c. 1343–1400 · English poet, author of The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer, the medieval poet behind The Canterbury Tales, is the name most often attached to “time and tide wait for no man.” The reason is a real but different line: in the Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale he writes “Ay fleeth the tyme; it nyl no man abyde” — time flees and waits for no one. But that couplet contains no “tide,” and the alliterative proverb we quote today is an anonymous English saying that his verse merely anticipates in spirit.