get up on the wrong side of bed

Idioms and Phrases

Be in a grouchy, irritable state, as in What's got into Max today? Did he get up on the wrong side of bed ? This expression alludes to the ancient superstition that it was bad luck to put one's left foot down first, and was so used in a number of 17th-century plays. By the early 1800s it was associated more with ill humor than misfortune.