Thereafter, occurrences become more frequent, with two in 1985 (one from a Harlequin Books romance and one from another sci-fi story), and one in 1986 from the U.S.
“Christophe, Andrea, get your butts over here. “ Sounds like a plan.” Sarah switched channels. “I'll lower, you steady.” Suddenly he remembered who was boss. How much could the man weigh here, even with the training suit? Thirty pounds? Surely no more than forty. He pulled the emergency release on his own tether, clipping it to Damien's suit. From Richard Lovett & William Gleason, " Nightfall on the Peak of Eternal Light," in The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984): The next exact match is a decade later, and also in the context of sciene fiction. " Sounds like a plan," Cynthia's voice came to him dimly she had heard. To the Facility with the greatest facility." And, he thought, I'll bet I wouldn't be the only husband in California who went. "You know," Ian said after her, "if there was any way you could get me classified as a pre-person, you'd end me there. Dick, " The Pre-Persons," in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1974): But it wasn't a plan when I was here in this office that day."īut those formulations are still a far cry from the plain remark, "Sounds like a plan." The first definite match for "Sounds like a plan" in the Google Books search result listings is from Philip K. "I planned the novel, and then I wrote it, and then I had it typed, and then I submitted it to this contest, and then I learned they wanted to publish it, so I thought you and Mr. įATHER ( interrupting): Bob would be more interested in his work!įATHER: That sounds like a plan worth trying.Īnd from Jerome Weidman, The Sound of Bow Bells (1962) : Now, if you and I showed a little more enthusiasm, then perhaps. What have we been doing to help him? Nothing. For example, The Grade Teacher (1936) contains this snippet of dialogue: There are indeed some early (and correctly dated) instances of rather short sentences in the search results.
Likewise, another match, Dina Koehly, A Gift From Above is listed in the Google Books summary as being from 1960 but was actually published in 1996.
The match that HotLicks cites in a comment above as being from 1940 is, I believe, to Janelle McCulloch, One for the Road: Travelling America in Pursuit of Happiness, which the Google Books summary lists as having been published in 1940, but which in fact was published in 2009. A Google Books search for the free-standing sentence "Sounds like a plan" yields close to 300 valid matches overall-and the great majority of them are from the years since 2008 (which is the last year that current Ngram charts track).ĭespite searching every individual match from a Google Books search stretching across the years 1920–1980, I couldn't find any matches for the freestanding sentence "Sounds like a plan" before 1974. It appears to be especially common in the United States, but Google Books searches that specify the corpus British English suggest that the wording has gained a foothold in other English-speaking regions as well.Īn Ngram chart from the undifferentiated corpus English illustrates how the frequency of "sounds like a plan" in all contexts increased in the years between 19:īut even this steep rise since 1990 is far less dramatic looking than it would be if the chart tracked matches for the years 2009–2014. In fact, I would describe it today as a catch-phrase or sentence-length idiom-not as slang. A: We'll sell the sofa and buy some comfortable chairs.
DON: Let's meet tomorrow and settle the matter. What you say sounds promising and is a good plan. Richard Spears, Common American Phrases in Everyday Contexts (2011) evidently views the expession as a common American phrase:
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