Cost an Arm and a Leg

The popular story

Two origin tales get repeated everywhere. The first says the idiom comes from portrait painting: a head-and-shoulders picture was cheap, adding arms cost more, and a full portrait with legs was the priciest of all — so an expensive one literally ‘cost an arm and a leg.’ The second says the phrase was coined after World War II for servicemen who paid for victory with amputated limbs, the ultimate high price.

What the record shows

The earliest confirmed printing of the full phrase is from December 1949, in the Long Beach Independent of California: “Food Editor Beulah Karney has more than 10 ideas for the homemaker who wants to say ‘Merry Christmas’ and not have it cost her an arm and a leg.” That places the idiom squarely in mid-20th-century American English, exactly as it is generally described. Behind it sit two older, separate expressions. In 1849, Sharpe’s London Journal used the image of giving a limb as sacrifice: a boy “could gladly give his right arm to be cut off” to grow up faster. And by 1875 the Burlington Daily Hawk-Eye recorded the American phrase ‘if it takes a leg,’ meaning ‘whatever it costs.’ The modern idiom reads as a fusion of those two.

The verdict

The phrase itself is genuinely attested, with a solid dated first appearance in 1949 — so on that point the record is clear. But both famous origin stories fail. The portrait-painting explanation has no evidence: painters did charge more for larger canvases, yet nothing shows they priced by counting limbs, and the tale does not square with a phrase that only surfaces in the 1940s. The WWII-amputee explanation is merely possible; the timing fits, but no source actually connects the wording to wounded soldiers. Both belong in the folk-etymology bin.

What we don’t know

We cannot name who first said ‘cost an arm and a leg,’ and the 1949 newspaper line is almost certainly not the true first use — only the first that survives in a searchable record. The exact route by which ‘give an arm’ and ‘take a leg’ merged into a single phrase is undocumented. Anyone claiming a precise birth moment is guessing.

How it changed

The trajectory runs from sacrifice to price. In the 1800s a limb stood for something you would willingly give up (your right arm) or spend at any cost (if it takes a leg). By the late 1940s the two images had combined and the meaning shifted to pure expense: not what you would sacrifice, but what something painfully drains from your wallet. The doubling — arm AND leg — simply intensifies the earlier single-limb figures.

Usage today

It is now one of the most common English idioms for ‘very expensive,’ used lightly and often hyperbolically: rent, tickets, weddings, car repairs. It frequently pairs with its opposite, ‘not cost an arm and a leg,’ in advertising and budgeting advice — fittingly, the same framing as its 1949 debut about an affordable Christmas.