hit [OE] The earliest sense of hit, in the Old English period, was ‘to come upon, meet with, find’. Popular successes, first of all plays, and then songs, have been called hits since the beginning of the 19th century. In the 1990s the phrase to hit the ground running became something of a cliché. It might seem to refer to soldiers disembarking rapidly from a helicopter, but the first example, from 1985, refers to someone being shot at. Marksmanship and shooting are behind a number of other phrases, including to hit the mark [M17th], ‘to be successful in an attempt or accurate in a guess’ and hit-and-miss [L19th] ‘done or occurring at random’, which is more understandable in its earlier form hit-or- miss [E17th]. Hit the nail on the head is Late Middle English in the form ‘hit on the head of the nail’s end’, meaning ‘to speak the truth’.