The phrase “crocodile tears” comes from an ancient belief that crocodiles weep while devouring their prey, faking grief over the very creature they’re killing. This image of false sorrow was so vivid that it stuck around for over two thousand years, eventually becoming one of the most recognized idioms in the English language for insincere displays of emotion.
The Ancient Myth Behind the Phrase
The idea traces back at least to the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Greek historian Herodotus mentioned crocodiles in his Histories in the fifth century BCE, and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote about crocodile behavior in his first-century encyclopedia Naturalis Historia. The Roman historian Livy also referenced the legend, and by the third century, the Roman author Claudius Aelianus described it again in his writings on animals. The core story was consistent across centuries: crocodiles supposedly shed tears as they consumed their victims, as though mourning the very meal they were eating.
Whether these writers believed the tears were literal or used them as a moral illustration is hard to say. But the image carried enormous symbolic power. A predator pretending to grieve while killing was the perfect metaphor for hypocrisy.
How Medieval and Renaissance Writers Spread It
The phrase entered the English-speaking world largely through medieval travel writing. In the 14th century, Sir John Mandeville described crocodiles weeping over their prey in his widely read (and largely fictional) travelogue. His account cemented the image in European popular culture at a time when most readers had never seen a crocodile and had no way to verify the claim.
Shakespeare then gave the expression literary permanence. In Othello, the jealous title character rages about false tears: “If that the earth could teem with women’s tears, each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.” He also referenced the legend in Henry VI Part 2 and Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s contemporary Edward Topsell repeated the crocodile tears story in 1607 as though it were natural history. By this point, the phrase was thoroughly embedded in English as shorthand for fake sorrow.
Do Crocodiles Actually Cry While Eating?
Surprisingly, yes. In 2006, neurologist Malcolm Shaner and University of Florida zoologist Kent Vliet conducted the first rigorous test of the old legend. They observed seven caimans (close relatives of crocodiles) feeding on dry land at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida. Five of the seven animals visibly “wept” while eating, producing tears from their eyes during meals. Their paper, published in the journal BioScience, called this “the first unequivocal evidence that crocodilians lacrimate during meals.”
The tears aren’t emotional, though. Crocodilians likely produce them as a byproduct of the mechanics of eating. The hissing, huffing, and jaw movements involved in feeding force air through the sinuses, which stimulates the tear glands. So the ancient observers weren’t wrong that crocodiles cry while eating. They were just wrong about why.
The Medical Condition Named After the Myth
The legend also gave its name to a real neurological condition. Crocodile tears syndrome, formally known as Bogorad syndrome, causes people to shed tears involuntarily while eating, chewing, drinking, or even smelling food. It’s named after F.A. Bogorad, the Russian neuropathologist who described it.
The condition develops after damage to the facial nerve, which controls both salivation and tear production. When the nerve heals, its fibers sometimes reconnect to the wrong targets. Nerve fibers that were supposed to regrow toward the salivary glands instead reach the tear glands. So when the brain sends a signal to produce saliva in response to food, tears come out instead. The tearing typically affects one eye (the side where the nerve was damaged), though rare bilateral cases exist. It’s painless and doesn’t cause eye irritation or light sensitivity.
What “Crocodile Tears” Means Today
In everyday language, calling someone’s tears “crocodile tears” is a serious accusation. It means you believe they’re faking sadness to manipulate you, just as the mythical crocodile supposedly grieved over the animal it was devouring.
Research on how people respond to perceived fake crying shows the label carries real social consequences. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that when people judged someone’s tears to be insincere, they rated that person as significantly more manipulative, less reliable, less warm, and less competent. Interestingly, these negative judgments held even when the tears were actually genuine. In other words, it’s the perception of fakeness that does the damage, not whether the tears are truly fake. The study also found that people aren’t particularly good at telling real crying from fake crying, though some research suggests that false remorse tends to come with a wider, more inconsistent range of emotional expressions than genuine grief.
The phrase shows up in legal commentary too. There’s a longstanding assumption that defendants might cry in court to sway a jury, and the term “crocodile tears” is regularly used to describe that suspicion. Whether courtroom tears actually help defendants is debatable, but the cultural instinct to question visible emotion in high-stakes settings goes straight back to that ancient image of a weeping predator.