murder will out
Secrets or hidden crimes will eventually be exposed or discovered; nothing that is secret can remain a secret forever.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
“Be careful with your secrets, because murder will out.”
“He thought he had hidden the evidence perfectly, but he forgot that murder will out.”
“The corrupt politician believed his lies were safe, but the leaked documents proved that murder will out when the public finally learned the truth.”
“Despite the decades of silence and the careful destruction of records, the truth eventually surfaced, proving once again that murder will out.”
The phrase appears as early as the late 14th century within the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, functioning as a literal assertion that the crime of homicide will inevitably become public knowledge. It is frequently associated with the mediaeval superstition of cruentation, which held that the presence of a murderer would cause a corpse’s wounds to bleed afresh. While the forensic utility of a leaking cadaver has since been questioned, the linguistic observation that such secrets rarely keep themselves has remained in the English lexicon for over six centuries.
Last updated August 10, 2026