A person who closely resembles a parent, as in Like her mother, Karen has very little patience—a chip off the old block. This term, with its analogy to a chip of stone or wood that closely resembles the larger block it was cut from, dates from ancient times (Theocritus, Idyls, c. 270 b.c.). In English it was already a proverb by the 17th century, then often put as chip of the old block.

An expression used of people who closely resemble their parents in some way: “Mark just won the same sailboat race his father won twenty years ago; he's a chip off the old block.”