Saved by the Bell

A popular and genuinely eerie story claims this phrase comes from Victorian "safety coffins," fitted with a bell and string so that anyone mistakenly buried alive could ring for help. It's a great story for the era: premature burial was a real Victorian anxiety, fuelled by writers like Edgar Allan Poe. The trouble is there's no documented case of anyone actually being rescued this way, and no evidence the phrase was ever used in that sense. The real, much less dramatic origin is boxing slang from the second half of the 1800s: a fighter in danger of being knocked out or losing a round is "saved" by the bell signalling the round's end. The phrase only became widely known once boxing commentary started being broadcast on the radio in the 1920s.