one man’s trash is another man’s treasure

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one man’s trash is another man’s treasure (proverb)
/wʌn mænz træʃ ɪz əˈnʌðər mænz ˈtrɛʒər/

Meanings

• Something worthless to one person can be valuable to someone else.
• People have different tastes, preferences, and values.
• What is useless in one context may be useful in another.
• Value is subjective and depends on perspective.

Synonyms: junk-to-gem; hidden gem; someone else’s gold; trash-to-treasure; one’s discard, another’s delight.

Example Sentences

1. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure – Sarah sold her old furniture at a yard sale, and the buyers were thrilled to find unique vintage pieces.
2. Tom gave away old comic books, not realizing collectors would see them as valuable – One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
3. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure – An artist picked up discarded metal scraps and turned them into stunning sculptures.
4. She almost threw away the antique vase, but her friend gladly took it—one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Origin and History

The proverbial idea expressed by “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” — that value is subjective and relative — is ancient in spirit but relatively late in the exact wording. Modern scholarship and digitized nineteenth-century texts show the specific trash/treasure wording appearing in printed English in the mid-19th century, while cognate proverbs with the same sense go back to classical antiquity and were common in English from the 16th–17th centuries.

Ancient Antecedents

The conceptual ancestor is explicit in Latin. Lucretius wrote a line meaning, “What is food for some may be bitter poison for others,” a phrase that establishes the core idea that what benefits one person can harm another. In English, the close proverb “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” is attested in the early modern period, with an English instance from the 1500s. This proverb supplied the idiomatic model from which later English variants, including trash/treasure, derive.

Earliest Printed Occurrence of the Trash/Treasure Wording

The printed instance of the trash/rubbish — treasure formulation in English appears in the introduction to John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (Vol. I), published in Edinburgh in 1860. Campbell wrote:

“But one man’s rubbish may be another’s treasure; and what is the standard of value in such a pursuit as this?”

This line demonstrates the exact use of the proverb in its now-familiar structure.

Nineteenth-Century Diffusion and Later Printings

After Campbell’s 1860 usage, the same idea and close wordings appeared more often in late-19th-century periodicals and essays. A widely circulated 1879 piece in Chambers’s Journal rephrased it as, “… one man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure.” By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, variants such as “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure” and the U.S. phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” started to appear in newspapers and magazines. The phrase became increasingly common in general English usage during the 20th century.

Country of First Appearance

The earliest printed instance of the trash/treasure wording appeared in a Scottish publication. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands was compiled and printed in Edinburgh in 1860, which places the first recorded usage of this phrasing in Scotland. This establishes that the popular English variant originated in the United Kingdom.

Main Theories and Scholarly Beliefs About the Origin

Researchers assert three complementary explanations. First, the trash/treasure line is a late idiomatic variant of an older proverb, “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” whose conceptual root dates back to classical authors like Lucretius. Second, the precise wording using rubbish → treasure crystallized in nineteenth-century British print with Campbell’s 1860 introduction and then spread widely. Third, because the sentiment is a universal observation about taste and utility, similar expressions arose in other languages and dialects. The evidence confirms that the idea is ancient, the form originated in Britain, and the phrase became popular in print during the 19th century.

Origin Conclusion

The saying’s idea is ancient and cross-cultural, appearing in classical texts and early English proverbs. The exact trash/rubbish → treasure wording that modern speakers use appeared in printed English in the nineteenth century, with John F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (Edinburgh, 1860) as the source. The phrase then entered wider circulation through periodicals and evolved into the familiar modern variants popular in the 20th century.

Variants

• one person’s junk is another person’s jewel.
• one man’s loss is another man’s gain.
• one person’s castoff is another’s prize.
• another man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure.

Proverbs