Cost an Arm and a Leg

"Cost an arm and a leg" means that something is extremely expensive, to the point of being outrageously priced. The phrase emphasises not just high cost but a sense of disproportionate sacrifice. This page explores the documented history of the phrase and the most plausible explanations for its vivid imagery.

How to Use This Page

Read the history section for the documented origin and earliest uses of this phrase. The modern usage section gives examples across everyday and professional contexts. The regional variations section notes how the phrase appears in different parts of the English-speaking world.

The History

The exact origin of "cost an arm and a leg" is not definitively established, but the phrase is well-documented in American English from the mid-twentieth century. The earliest confirmed written uses date to the 1940s and 1950s, with examples appearing in American newspapers and magazines of that era.

Several origin theories have been proposed. The most frequently repeated one claims the phrase originated from the high price of portrait paintings, where an artist would charge more to include limbs than just a head and shoulders, making a full-length portrait literally "cost an arm and a leg." While this is a plausible and appealing story, no documentary evidence connects it directly to the idiom's emergence.

A more straightforward explanation is that the phrase uses hyperbole to express extreme cost. Arms and legs are among the most essential parts of the body; losing one is the greatest imaginable physical sacrifice. The phrase follows a long English tradition of using bodily sacrifice as a metaphor for extreme cost or effort, similar to expressions like "give your right arm" for something. By saying something costs an arm and a leg, the speaker implies the price is so high it might as well require a literal physical sacrifice.

By the 1950s the phrase was in common use across North America and had begun spreading to British English, where it became fully established by the 1970s and 1980s.

How It Is Used Today

In everyday speech: "I would love that car, but it costs an arm and a leg."

In consumer reporting: "The new console is powerful, but at that price it is going to cost an arm and a leg for most families."

In business: "Hiring specialist contractors always costs an arm and a leg, but sometimes it is worth it."

Regional Variations

The phrase is standard across all major English-speaking regions, though it is particularly embedded in American English and emerged there first. British, Australian, and Canadian English all use it with the same meaning. In Australia, "a small fortune" is a common alternative with the same emphasis on absurdly high cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the portrait painting origin confirmed? No. The portrait painting theory is widely repeated but has no documentary evidence connecting it to the specific emergence of the phrase. It may be a folk etymology that developed after the phrase was already in use.

Is there a similar phrase in other languages? Many languages have equivalent hyperbolic cost idioms. In French, something very expensive "coûte les yeux de la tête" (costs the eyes in your head). In German, it "kostet ein Vermögen" (costs a fortune). The English version is particularly vivid because it specifies physical limbs.

When is it appropriate to use the phrase? The phrase suits informal and semi-formal contexts well. It is too colloquial for formal reports or academic writing, but works naturally in conversation, journalism, and product reviews.

What is the opposite expression? "A steal," "a bargain," "dirt cheap," or "cost next to nothing" all convey that something is surprisingly affordable, which is the opposite of costing an arm and a leg.

Also try these free tools related to Cost an Arm and a Leg: - Word Origins Hub

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What the dated record shows

The phrase is a twentieth-century coin. The dated examples below come from newspaper archives and the first-citation files kept by dictionary researchers, and together they place the full expression in American print from the mid 1940s onward.

Two features of that table are worth pausing on. First, the compound form appears in print as early as 1946, not 1949, so the Long Beach example that many secondary sources quote is not the earliest witness. Second, the examples sit immediately after the end of the Second World War, and the 1946 report about the subscription price appears in a news item about a magazine published by an organisation for amputees. That is consistent with the war-wound explanation without proving it.

How to test an origin story

Any claim about where a phrase came from can be checked in a fixed order. The order matters, because a story that fails an early check does not need the later ones.

1. Find the earliest dated print example you can locate. The Oxford English Dictionary keeps a first-citation file for each entry and prints one dated citation; newspaper archives carry the rest. A claim about origin cannot be older than the earliest witness unless it explains why no earlier witness survives.
2. Put the proposed explanation on the same timeline. Write down the period the explanation describes and the period the phrase appears in print. A gap of more than a century needs a reason.
3. Ask what documentary trail the explanation would leave. A pricing convention that shaped everyday speech for generations tends to leave price lists, invoices, advertisements, or trade complaints behind it.
4. Check whether the explanation accounts for the wording, and not just the sense. The specific pairing of an arm with a leg is the part of the phrase that a theory has to explain.

The resources that make step 1 possible are the Oxford English Dictionary (its dated citations and revision notes), Green's Dictionary of Slang, the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms, the Google Books Ngram Viewer (a frequency plot by year, useful for charting when a phrase became common rather than when it first appeared), the Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper archive (1690 to 1963, free to search), the British Newspaper Archive, and the public citation indexes maintained by independent researchers such as Barry Popik.

Why the portrait story gets repeated

The tale that portrait painters charged by the limb, so that a head-and-shoulders canvas was cheap and a full-length canvas with legs cost a small fortune, has three appealing features and one fatal flaw.

The appealing features are that it is concrete, it is old enough to feel like history, and it explains why legs would enter the price at all. Painters did charge more for larger canvases, and a full-length portrait did cost more than a bust, which gives the story a grain of truth at the level of size and price.

The fatal flaw is the timeline. If painting practice produced the phrase, the phrase should appear in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, in the letters, diaries, satirical prints and newspapers of the period. It does not appear in the full form until 1946. An explanation that runs more than a century ahead of its own evidence has to be rejected as the source, whatever the merits of the painting practice itself. The story survives because it is a good story, and good stories circulate without being checked.

A related claim, that men in eighteenth-century portraits keep one hand inside a waistcoat to save the painter the price of an arm, fails for the same reason. The pose was a conventional sign of composure and civic virtue, and no invoice charging by the limb has been produced for it either.

The two phrases the idiom grew from

Later explanation holds that the idiom formed when two older expressions met. The first is the offer of a limb as payment, familiar in English as "I would give my right arm for that", which is recorded from the nineteenth century. The second is the conditional "even if it takes a leg", which carries the sense of a sacrifice accepted as the price of a result. In the 1940s the two collapsed into one phrase, and the pairing stuck because two limbs sound more expensive than one.

That account fits the evidence better than the painting story for a simple reason: it needs no document that has been lost. It needs only two wordings that are already attested, a period in which they could merge, and a print record that starts where the merger happened.

Register and where the phrase does not belong

The idiom is marked as informal in dictionary labels. Its weight comes from hyperbole, so it loses force in any document that must state an exact figure.

Two English relatives carry the same idea with a different image. "Pay through the nose" describes an extraction rather than a sacrifice, and it carries a stronger suggestion that the buyer was overcharged. "Cost the earth" uses the value of the planet where the arm-and-leg version uses the value of a body, and it reads as more British than American. Australian English often reaches for "a small fortune" instead, which trades vividness for neutrality.

Where the dating comes from

The dating above follows the first-citation record: the Oxford English Dictionary entry for the expression and the dated newspaper citations compiled and published by the independent researcher Barry Popik, whose citation files are used by dictionary editors. The OED glosses the expression as an enormous amount of money or an exorbitant price, and the oldest citation in its own entry is dated 1956, ten years later than the earliest newspaper examples in the table above. The gap between the two records is itself the normal state of affairs for a phrase that spent its first decade in speech and local print rather than in books.