A Professor Is One Who Talks in Someone Else's Sleep
Not Auden's line — an anonymous joke he repeatedAnonymousUnattributed American newspaper humor · in print from August 1900 · aimed at professors by 1925
Auden really did say it. A Columbia University Press newsletter, The Pleasures of Publishing, reported the quip from a luncheon in its issue of 15 April 1940, and the Saturday Review of Literature spread it twelve days later. But the gag was not his: American papers had been running versions since 1900, and the exact one-line definition was already in print, unsigned, in a student magazine at Christmas 1937. The Auden scholar Edward Mendelson concluded that the poet “was merely repeating an old joke.”
“A Professor Is One Who Talks in Someone Else's Sleep” an anonymous newspaper joke, in print since 1900. W. H. Auden repeated it at a luncheon; the Columbia University Press newsletter The Pleasures of Publishing reported it on 15 April 1940. The exact definition had already appeared unsigned in The Virginia Spectator, Christmas 1937. Wikiquote files it under "Misattributed." Via Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to W. H. Auden. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
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Provenance
The 1940 report
Earliest record of Auden saying it
The Pleasures of Publishing, Vol. VII, No. 15 — 15 April 1940
Publisher
Columbia University Press — a weekly mimeographed one-page newsletter
Earlier anonymous printing
The Virginia Spectator, Christmas 1937, p. 29
Oldest known ancestor
The Evening Post (New York), 29 August 1900, p. 6, from the Boston Transcript
W. H. Auden, the poet, amused several of our professorial friends at a recent luncheon by defining their office. “A professor,” said he, “is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.”
Reported speech, 1940
The item that opens The Pleasures of Publishing for 15 April 1940, transcribed by the Auden scholar Edward Mendelson. Note what it does and does not claim: Auden was defining, not coining — and the newsletter plainly had no idea the joke was already decades old.
1900 — the ancestor, and the joke is on himself. A filler item in The Evening Post of New York for 29 August 1900, picked up from the Boston Transcript, has a man asked whether he talks in his sleep reply that he has sometimes talked in other people’s. No profession is named yet. Quote Investigator’s citation list ↗
1906–1939 — it keeps changing targets. The barb moved from a preacher — the line delivered by his wife (credited to Woman’s Home Companion, 1906) — to a bore, then a clergyman, then in September 1925 to a college professor, and by February 1939 the Schenectady Gazette was printing it about lecturers. Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, located the early links. The full chronology ↗
Christmas 1937 — the exact definition, unsigned. Before Auden is on record with it, the one-line definition appears anonymously in The Virginia Spectator, a University of Virginia student magazine, in a joke column called “Wahooria” under the heading “Somnivocalist.” Edward Mendelson’s note ↗
April 1940 — Auden gets the credit. The Columbia University Press newsletter reports the luncheon quip on 15 April; the Saturday Review of Literature repeats it in “Trade Winds” on 27 April; by 1 May the Winnipeg Free Press is printing the line with Auden’s name attached to it. Barry Popik’s citations ↗
This is an anonymous joke, so there is no author or estate holding rights in the line itself — and no printing of this exact wording before 1931 has been documented. The versions that are safely out of copyright (1900, 1906, 1925) use different words; the earliest printings we can document of this definition — the Christmas 1937 Virginia Spectator item (“Definition of a professor: One who talks in someone else’s sleep”) and the 15 April 1940 Columbia University Press newsletter — both fall after the 1931 cut-off. quotle.info therefore makes no public-domain claim here.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What actually gets muddled
Auden is one of those names that attracts other people’s wit, and this is the unusual case where he genuinely said the line — he simply did not invent it. Three separate things get run together:
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The line itselfW. H. Auden Repeated, not written
Quote Investigator’s conclusion is that Auden used a version of the joke about professors by 1940 and was a focus of its popularization, but that the expression was already in circulation before him. Quote Investigator ↗
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Who the joke was originally aboutPreachers, clergymen and bores 1900–1925
The oldest form names no profession at all and is self-deprecating; by 1906 it is aimed at a preacher, by 1916 at a bore, by August 1925 at clergy. The professor only arrives in September 1925, and then as a doctor-and-patient dialogue rather than the crisp definition people quote now. The dated sequence ↗
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How the credit hardenedEvan Esar’s quotation dictionaries 1949 and 1951
Esar’s Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (Doubleday, 1949) printed the line under Auden’s name, and the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations he edited with Nicolas Bentley is the citation later reference works lean on — including the Yale Book of Quotations. Once a standard dictionary attaches a name, the anonymous newspaper trail behind it stops being visible. Barry Popik’s source notes ↗
✓Auden said it at a luncheon and was reported saying it — but the joke had been running in American newspapers since 1900, and the exact definition was in print unsigned by Christmas 1937. Wikiquote files the line under “Misattributed” ↗, noting that Auden was repeating an anonymous joke and never claimed to have originated it.
Context
Why this one stuck to Auden
The joke is a small machine: a professor talks, and the talking happens inside other people’s sleep. It works on anyone who addresses a captive audience, which is exactly why it spent forty years wandering between professions — preachers, bores, clergymen, college professors, English teachers, lecturers, and eventually politicians all took a turn as the target. The earliest version, from 1900, does not accuse anyone; the speaker admits it about himself.
Auden was simply the first person famous enough for someone to write it down with a name attached. He had sailed from England to New York in January 1939, he was the most talked-about poet in America, and he was at lunch with people from the Columbia University Press — who published the quip in their own newsletter, whereupon the Saturday Review of Literature amplified it and the quotation dictionaries canonized it. He made the crack, incidentally, before he had done any of his own American teaching: the University of Michigan post came in 1941–42, Swarthmore from 1942 to 1945.
He didn’t coin it. He was just the first person famous enough that someone wrote it down with a name attached.
How the researchers cracked it
Mendelson notes that Auden appears to have heard the joke in the autumn of 1939 and recorded it in a journal — which is to say the poet was collecting it, not composing it.
Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, supplied the pre-1940 newspaper citations, and Mendelson writes that Shapiro has found still earlier examples which he has left to Shapiro to publish. Any claim that a particular year is the ‘first’ appearance of this joke should be read with that in mind.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1907–1973 · Anglo-American poet · taught at Michigan and Swarthmore in the 1940s
Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) sailed from England to New York in January 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946, and for those years he was about the most talked-about poet in the country. He knew academic life from the lectern as well as the seat, teaching English at the University of Michigan in 1941–42 and at Swarthmore College from 1942 to 1945 — both after the professor quip was reported. He never claimed the line as his own invention; the Auden scholar Edward Mendelson found that Auden had apparently heard the joke and noted it in a journal in the autumn of 1939.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Documented source
Edward Mendelson, “Who Wrote Auden’s Definition of a Professor?” The W. H. Auden Society, May 2013, quoting The Pleasures of Publishing (Columbia University Press) 7, no. 15 (15 April 1940). Earlier anonymous printing of the same definition: The Virginia Spectator 1, no. 3 (Christmas 1937): 29.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A Professor Is One Who Talks in Someone Else's Sleep’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-professor-is-one-who-talks-in-someone-elses-sleep/