Albatross (metaphor)

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The word albatross is sometimes used to mean an encumbrance, or a wearisome burden. It is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

In the poem, an albatross starts to follow a ship, and is seen as a good omen. However the titular mariner shoots the albatross with a crossbow, and is made to wear the bird around his neck as a penance by his shipmates.

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

This sense is catalogued in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1936 and 1955, but it seems only to have entered general usage in the 1960s.

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