What is it? A wild, swinging punch, thrown with the full weight behind it, designed to send the opponent in to the middle of next week.

Origin: Not for the first time in our jargon series, there appears to be no agreement on the origin of a term. We always assumed haymaker came from, well, haymaking, and that is one of the theories – that the way in which a haymaker is thrown is similar to “the action of manually cutting hay by swinging a scythe”.

But an alternative theory, as featured in the Dictionary of American Slang, suggests the term, first used in boxing in the early 1900s, refers to the victim of the punch “hitting the hay”, ie, losing sleep or consciousness.

The third theory we came upon was greeted by stony silence on Yahoo Answers: the punch was made famous in the early 1920s by Eugene “Lights Out” Hamaker, the American son of Swedish immigrants. After flooring an opponent with a swinging right hand, the announcer mispronounced his name, calling him Gene Haymaker. And the name, so this theory goes, was forever more used to describe the punch.

We should point out that the proponent of this theory appears to be a lonely voice, although we’d love to believe that Eugene Lights Out Hamaker actually existed. That swinging scythe, though, sounds a bit more convincing to us.