Throw Your Hat in the Ring

This one comes from bare-knuckle boxing, where matches were often fought in a rough circle of onlookers rather than a formal ring. Anyone willing to take on the champion, or to challenge for a spot, would throw their hat into the circle as a visible way of announcing themselves over the noise of the crowd. An early recorded example of the practice appears in London's The Morning Chronicle on 30 November 1804. The phrase's most famous outing came over a century later, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt told a group of journalists "my hat is in the ring," confirming he was running for president, and cementing the political sense the idiom carries today.