Pulling Your Leg

"Pulling your leg" means joking with someone or teasing them, making them believe something that is not true for the sake of humour. When someone says "I am only pulling your leg," they are admitting they were not being serious and no offence was intended. This page explores the documented history of the phrase and the theories that explain where it came from.

How to Use This Page

Read the history section for the competing origin theories and the earliest written uses of the phrase. The modern usage section shows how it appears in everyday English across different contexts. The similar phrases section covers related idioms for joking and teasing.

The History

The phrase "pull someone's leg" in the sense of joking or teasing is documented in English from the late nineteenth century. The earliest confirmed written uses in British and American newspapers appear from the 1880s, with the meaning of hoaxing or teasing clearly established by that decade.

Two main origin theories exist. The first connects the phrase to street crime in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, where thieves would trip their victims by hooking or pulling at their leg, causing them to fall so an accomplice could rob them. The idea is that leg-pulling was associated with being made a fool of involuntarily, and the metaphor transferred to verbal trickery. This theory is plausible given the era, but documentary evidence directly linking the criminal act to the phrase is limited.

The second theory is more straightforward and connects to the image of being led astray or made to look foolish, with the pulling of the leg suggesting manipulation or destabilising someone's footing, metaphorically as well as physically. This general sense of physical unsteadiness as a metaphor for being misled fits naturally into the way English idioms develop.

What is clear is that by the 1880s the phrase was fully established in colloquial English on both sides of the Atlantic, used to mean gentle teasing rather than malicious deception. Its tone has always been relatively light, distinguishing it from phrases that imply deliberate harmful deception.

How It Is Used Today

In everyday conversation: "I am not really leaving the company. I am only pulling your leg."

In media: television presenters and comedians frequently use the phrase to signal a joke or prank.

In writing: "He raised an eyebrow, not sure whether she was being serious or pulling his leg."

Similar Phrases

"Having someone on" is a British English synonym for the same gentle teasing. "Winding someone up" means deliberately winding someone into believing something false for amusement. "Taking the mickey" is British English for gentle mockery. "Kidding" is the American English informal equivalent.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is "pulling your leg" always harmless? In most uses, yes. The phrase implies light, good-natured teasing rather than malicious deception. If the joke crosses into genuine deception that causes real harm, a more serious term like "deceiving" or "lying to" would typically be used instead.

Is the street crime theory confirmed? Not definitively. While street crime involving tripping victims was a real phenomenon in nineteenth-century Britain, the direct connection to this specific phrase has not been established through documentary evidence. It remains a plausible but unverified theory.

Is "pulling your leg" British or American in origin? The phrase appears in both British and American English from roughly the same period in the 1880s, making it difficult to attribute to one origin. It may have developed on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously.

What is the difference between "pulling your leg" and "taking the mickey"? Both describe gentle teasing, but "taking the mickey" (or "taking the mick") is stronger and can carry a sharper edge of mockery. "Pulling your leg" is softer and more clearly signals a joke that is meant in good humour.

The dated evidence, collected in one place

The claim that the phrase dates from the 1880s rests on a small number of printed sources. Laying them out by year makes the strength of the claim visible.

Three sources, two of them independent newspapers published weeks apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and one dictionary entry. That is a thin documentary base by the standards of modern lexicography, and it is the base the whole date rests on.

How a phrase gets dated

Dictionaries date a phrase from its earliest documented appearance in print, not from the moment someone first said it. The first citation is a lower bound. It proves the phrase existed at that date, and it says nothing about how long it had been in spoken use beforehand.

The consequence is that most idioms look younger than they are. A phrase can live in speech for decades before a writer decides to put it in a newspaper. The 1883 citations therefore do not mean the phrase was invented in 1883. They mean it had reached print by then, and had probably been in circulation for some time before that.

That is why this page describes the origin as the 1880s rather than naming a year. Tightening the window further would need a citation earlier than 1879, and none has been found.

Why the trip and rob story cannot be confirmed

The theory most often repeated connects the phrase to thieves who tripped a victim by pulling at a leg so an accomplice could take a purse. Tripping and robbing did happen in eighteenth and nineteenth century cities. The gap in the story is the link, not the crime.

Confirming the link would need a documented use of the phrase in a criminal context near the date of origin, or a contemporary account that draws the comparison. Neither has been produced. The theory survives because the image is easy to picture, which is not the same as evidence.

The caution generalises. When an idiom has a colourful explanation that appears in dozens of secondary sources and no primary citation, the explanation is usually a plausible story attached to the phrase after the fact.

The support metaphor, which does have a documented history

A quieter explanation rests on an older sense of the word leg. The Online Etymology Dictionary records that to be on your last legs, meaning near the end of life, is in use from the 1590s, with the idea of something that holds a person up and keeps them moving. English had been using legs as a metaphor for support for roughly three centuries before the phrase in question appeared.

Pulling a support out from under someone fits that older image without requiring any criminal underworld. It also explains the tone: the person being teased is momentarily wrong-footed rather than robbed. The tone of the phrase has always been light, which the crime theory does not explain as neatly.

Related phrases and how hard they land

English has several ways to say that someone is being teased, and they are not equally gentle.

Pulling a leg is the mildest of the group in British and American usage alike, which is exactly why it is the phrase people reach for when they want to signal that no harm was meant. A speaker who says "I am only pulling your leg" is doing two things at once: admitting the statement was false and asking for the joke to be taken in good humour.

What the sources do and do not settle

The dictionary record settles the date and the meaning. It does not settle the motivation, and no source consulted for this page claims to. Anyone who tells you the origin is known is either repeating a story without its citation or misreading a dictionary entry that gives a first use rather than an etymology.

The possessive in the middle of the phrase

The phrase takes a possessive in the middle, which is the part learners get wrong. It is pull someone's leg, not pull the leg. The owner of the leg is the person being teased, so the pronoun changes with the target: he was pulling my leg, she was pulling his leg, they were pulling each other's legs.

A second form is the compound noun, usually written with a hyphen. A leg-pull is the joke itself, and the Oxford English Dictionary dates that noun to 1879, four years before the earliest citation for the verb phrase. The order matters, because it suggests the noun and the verb were developing together rather than one being derived from the other after the fact.

The phrase also works as a modifier. Leg-pulling as an adjective describes the tone of a remark rather than the act, which is how it appears in writing about journalism and politics when a story turns out to have been a prank.

Three checks before repeating an origin story

Idiom origins circulate freely, and most of what appears online is a retelling of a retelling. Three checks separate a sourced claim from a story.

Start with a dated primary source. A newspaper page, a book, or a court record with a date on it beats a summary of one. A citation that names a date and a publication can be followed back; a citation that names neither cannot.

Then check a dictionary entry. The Oxford English Dictionary gives first citations for each sense and revises them as evidence turns up. Phrase Finder, which tracks the same phrase, dates it to around 1880 rather than to a single year. Two independent reference works agreeing on the decade is stronger evidence than either one alone.

Then ask what would make the claim false. The trip and rob theory would be falsified by the absence of any criminal-context use near the date of origin. That absence is exactly what we find, which is why the theory stays a theory. A story that cannot be falsified is not evidence of anything, however often it is repeated.

Also try these free tools related to Pulling Your Leg: - Word Origins Hub

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