Kill two birds with one stone

一石二鳥 (isseki nichō): one stone, two birds. The four characters are the English proverb kill two birds with one stone written in kanji. The English is older than it looks: a bishop used it against Thomas Hobbes in 1656. Japanese met it in the Meiji as a sentence, to throw one stone and fell two birds, in a book on Russia of 1895, while the dictionaries of the day rendered the idiom with the older Chinese word 一挙両得 (ikkyo ryōtoku), one move, two gains. The four-character word with its own reading is a Taishō coinage: a novelist called it a proverb in 1926, and by 1930 it was everyone's. The Japanese word carries none of the English reproach; it is a plain word for efficiency.