Make a mountain out of a molehill

The meaning finds its opposite in the fable about the mountain in labour that gives birth to a mouse.

The earliest recorded use of the alliterative phrase making a mountain out of a molehill dates from 1548.

[8] The idiom is found in Nicholas Udall's translation of The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus vpon the newe testamente (1548) in the statement that "The Sophistes of Grece coulde through their copiousness make an Elephant of a flye, and a mountaine of a mollehill."

The comparison of the elephant with a fly (elephantem ex musca facere) is an old Latin proverb that Erasmus recorded in his collection of such phrases, the Adagia,[9] European variations on which persist.

If the idiom was not coined by Udall himself, the linguistic evidence above suggests that it cannot have been in existence long.