The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work
Not Vince Lombardi — an anonymous newspaper sayingUnknown newspaper witFirst printed July 1934 · author unrecorded
?Attribution status: Disputed — the wording predates Lombardi’s coaching career by five years (he was 21 and still a student in 1934) and no source of his contains it.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
The earliest strong match found by Quote Investigator ↗ is an unsigned filler item in the Oklahoma City Star of July 1934, printed under a “Clipped” label — the newspaper marker for material reprinted from an unnamed source. Vince Lombardi was 21 at the time and had not yet coached anything; the first citation attaching his name to the line is a 1994 sports column, 24 years after his death.
“The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work” Anonymous, Oklahoma City Star, July 1934. Frequently misattributed to Vince Lombardi, whose name was first attached to the line in 1994, 24 years after his death. Source: quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Vince Lombardi. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
Evoking the themes of work and success. Theme: "The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The paper trail
Earliest strong match
Oklahoma City Star (Oklahoma), July 1934
Form
Unsigned filler item, marked “Clipped” — which per Quote Investigator probably indicates it was reprinted from another periodical
Precursor jokes
Dictionary word-order gags in print from 1912 (duty/pleasure) and 1920–1922 (success; play/work)
Lombardi attribution
First documented 1994, in a Seattle Times sports column
The only place where SUCCESS comes before WORK is in the dictionary.
Anonymous, 1934
The 1934 Oklahoma City Star filler, with the capitalisation the paper used to point up the joke. The familiar modern form — “The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work” — is a later reshuffling of this same sentence.
1912–1922 — the joke family forms. The dictionary word-order gag was already newspaper filler: “The one place where duty always comes before pleasure is in the dictionary” ran in Kansas’s Iola Register in 1912 (Quote Investigator ↗), and by December 1920 The Kodak Magazine had applied it to success — “The only way to find success quickly without working for it, is to look it up in the dictionary” (Quote Investigator ↗).
July 1934 — the saying reaches its modern shape, anonymously. The Oklahoma City Star prints “The only place where SUCCESS comes before WORK is in the dictionary” as a filler item marked “Clipped,” with no author (Quote Investigator ↗).
1935–1980 — names start getting attached. Sportswriter Stubby Currence ran a version in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph in February 1935; Bennett Cerf credited editor Arthur Brisbane in 1957; The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations credited a teacher of Vidal Sassoon’s in 1980. Each came after the saying was already circulating (Quote Investigator ↗).
1994 — Lombardi’s turn. A Seattle Times sports column ascribes the adage to Vince Lombardi, who had died in 1970. The line appears nowhere on his Wikiquote page ↗ — not among his quotes, not even among the misattributions listed there.
No rights status can be asserted. The wording’s origin is a 1934 unsigned newspaper filler explicitly reprinted from an unidentified source, so there is no identifiable author, work, or first-publication event to anchor a copyright determination. It is emphatically not a Lombardi text, and quotle.info makes no public-domain claim for anonymous material of unknown provenance.
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.
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Fact-check
Everyone who has been credited with this
This is a classic orphan aphorism: a punchy, useful line with no parent, which means each generation staples it to whichever famous name fits the mood. Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence for any of the following.
✕
The whole lineVince Lombardi Most common today
The dominant modern attribution, and the newest. Lombardi died in 1970; the earliest citation crediting him that Quote Investigator ↗ located is a 1994 Seattle Times column — 60 years after the line was in print. Quote sites reproduce it under his name with no source at all, as on Goodreads ↗.
✕
The whole lineMark Twain No evidence
The default magnet name for any unowned epigram. Quote Investigator reports no substantive evidence Twain made the statement — it is absent from Barbara Schmidt’s TwainQuotes archive and from the compilation Mark Twain at Your Fingertips (Quote Investigator ↗).
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The whole lineArthur Brisbane 1957
Bennett Cerf credited the newspaper editor in 1957. Brisbane died in 1936, but the ascription surfaced two decades later — and after the saying was already circulating anonymously (Quote Investigator ↗).
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The whole lineVidal Sassoon 1980
The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations credited the hairdresser in 1980, quoting the line as something said by one of his teachers — which, even as printed, is not a claim that Sassoon coined it (Quote Investigator ↗).
✕
A 1935 variant wordingStubby Currence Earliest named
The Bluefield Daily Telegraph sportswriter ran “The dictionary is the only place where you come to SUCCESS before you get to WORK” in February 1935. He is the earliest named person associated with the joke, but his version postdates the anonymous 1934 printing (Quote Investigator ↗).
✓The honest answer: nobody knows who wrote it. It emerged from a family of newspaper dictionary jokes running since at least 1912, reached its familiar form in an unsigned 1934 filler item, and picked up famous names only afterwards — Lombardi’s last of all, in 1994 (Quote Investigator ↗).
Context
Why this one sticks to Lombardi
The line is a pun about alphabetical order, not a coaching philosophy — which is exactly why it drifted so freely. American papers of the 1910s and 1920s ran variations of this dictionary gag as column filler: duty before pleasure, play before work, success before work. They were disposable, unsigned and endlessly reprinted, so nobody held a claim to any of them.
Vince Lombardi inherited it because he is American sport’s patron saint of hard work. Once a saying about effort preceding reward is loose in the world, his name is the path of least resistance — the same mechanism that hands unowned wit to Mark Twain and unowned wisdom to Einstein. The attribution feels right, which is precisely the problem: it was never tested against a source.
The joke is about alphabetical order. The attribution is about vibes.
Read the full story
Lombardi’s genuinely documented lines are blunter and less cute. The Pro Football Hall of Fame ↗ records his first address to the Green Bay Packers in 1959: he had never been on a losing team, and did not intend to start.
A useful tell for orphan quotes: attributions that arrive after the subject’s death, in media with no citation habit — sports columns, greeting cards, motivational posters — rarely survive a search of the person’s own writing. This one arrived 24 years posthumously.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
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The real author
An unnamed newspaper writer, 1934
AN
Anonymous
Unidentified · American newspaper filler item, July 1934
The line has no known author. It surfaced in its modern form as an unsigned filler item in the Oklahoma City Star in July 1934, printed under a “Clipped” label — which per Quote Investigator probably indicates the item was reprinted from another periodical. It belongs to a family of dictionary word-order jokes circulating in American papers from at least 1912, passed between editors as column filler. Every famous name later attached to it — Currence, Brisbane, Sassoon, Twain, Lombardi — arrived after the saying was already in print.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented printing
“The only place where SUCCESS comes before WORK is in the dictionary,” unsigned filler item, Oklahoma City Star (Oklahoma City, OK), July 1934. Chronology per Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: The Dictionary Is the Only Place Where Success Comes Before Work,” Quote Investigator, October 20, 2014.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-dictionary-is-the-only-place-where-success-comes-before/