Why Do We Say ‘Even Steven’ and ‘Plain Jane’?

There’s a long-standing practice in English of incorporating proper names into everyday expressions — think “lazy Susan” or “Roger that.” Among the most familiar of these are “even Steven” and “plain Jane,” two phrases that, despite their different meanings, appear to have emerged in similar ways.

“Plain Jane” functions as both a noun, referring to a person who is unadorned or unremarkable, and an adjective, usually hyphenated as “plain-Jane,” to characterize someone or something that is not fancy or glamorous. While the phrase is rarely meant as praise, it’s not necessarily harsh. For example, in the context of the Anne Hathaway film The Princess Diaries, you might say, “Mia Thermopolis was a plain-Jane student until discovering she was a princess.”

This phrase was documented early in its usage in a 1912 novel: “She sha’n’t be a Plain Jane and No Nonsense, with her hair screwed back like a broom…” Unlike many English turns of phrase, “plain Jane” doesn’t have a deeper meaning; it emerged as a simple rhyming construction built around the common name “Jane.”

A similar story likely explains the origin of “even Steven” (or “even Stephen”): It’s another rhyming expression. It can be used as an adjective meaning “equal, fair, or tied,” so one might say, for instance, “We split the dinner bill even Steven.” An early recorded use dates to 1837, when a writer described balancing in a canoe: “I either sets right in the middle, or puts one leg one side and t’other t’other; which is sorter ‘even Stephen’-like.” Here, the sense of physical balance mirrors the figurative meaning of the modern phrase.

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But unlike “plain Jane,” “even Steven” may have another explanation. In 19th-century British English, “steven” was briefly used as slang for money. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that it remains unclear whether this monetary sense influenced the saying, given its frequent association with splitting sums of money equally. Either way, the endurance of “even Steven” and “plain Jane” exemplifies how sound alone — in this case a singsong rhyme — can be enough to secure an expression’s longevity.