Close but no cigar

The popular story

The explanation you will meet almost everywhere runs like this. In the first decades of the twentieth century, American fairgrounds, carnivals and amusement arcades were full of games of skill and chance: shooting galleries, high-strikers, ring tosses and the like. Many of these stalls were pitched at grown men, and the prize on offer was often a cigar rather than a stuffed toy. A player who did well but fell a fraction short would be waved away by the barker with something like, close, but no cigar. Over time, the story goes, the stallholder’s brush-off hardened into a general catchphrase for any effort that lands just outside success.

It is an attractive account, and an unusually sensible one as idiom origins go. It explains the oddly specific noun: not ‘no prize’ or ‘no win’ but no cigar, a detail that only makes sense if cigars really were the stake. It also matches the period. Cigars were a routine small reward for adult men at that time, and we have independent descriptions of fairground games offering them. A 1902 account of London amusements, for instance, describes a scoring game with the promise that a high score ‘will win a cigar’ — evidence that cigars as game prizes were a real, if British, practice in that era.

What the record shows

Here the picture becomes more cautious. The phrase itself does not surface in the written record until the late 1920s, by which point it is already being used as a finished, self-explanatory formula rather than being coined or explained.

The earliest firmly datable printed example currently available comes from a college publication, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, dated 2 July 1929. There the writer notes that several people ‘came close, but no cigar’ over a missed gathering — using the expression exactly as we would today, with no gloss, which tells us readers were already expected to understand it. A newspaper headline in the Long Island Daily Press from May of the same year is also cited by researchers, again in a context of someone finishing a narrow second.

Beyond 1929, the trail grows fainter and more disputed. The etymologist Dave Wilton has reported an even earlier sighting, a headline in the Yale Daily News of 28 May 1927 attached to an intramural baseball story. That would push the phrase back two further years, but the item is harder to verify independently than the 1929 citations, so it is best held at arm’s length rather than stated as settled fact.

One claim should be actively corrected. A great many articles report that the phrase was ‘first used’ in the published script of the 1935 film Annie Oakley, which contains the line ‘Close, Colonel, but no cigar!’ The 1935 script is a genuine and vivid early use, but it is plainly not the first: the 1929 citations pre-date it by several years. What the film most likely did was help carry an existing American expression to a wider audience.

The verdict

The honest reading is that this is a partly-true origin. The earliest datable uses sit squarely in the right world — American, early twentieth century, repeatedly tied to coming second in a contest or game — and the fairground-prize explanation is entirely consistent with that setting. The specific wording, with its insistence on a cigar, is hard to explain any other way.

What is missing is a direct link. No surviving document shows a stallholder actually saying the line, and no early source stops to explain the phrase by pointing at a carnival booth. The carnival story is therefore the most reasonable account on offer, and probably correct, but it rests on good circumstantial fit rather than on a smoking-gun citation. That is why it earns ‘likely’ rather than ‘proven’, and why careful references hedge it with phrases like ‘the most likely source’.

What we don’t know

We do not know who first said it, or in which precise setting. We cannot yet trace an unbroken line from an actual fairground cigar prize to the catchphrase in print, and the gap between the alleged practice and the first clear citations is filled by inference, not evidence. The disputed 1927 headline hints that the phrase may be older than the firm 1929 record suggests, but until such early sightings are confirmed, the true date of birth remains open. Nor can we rule out that the cigar in the phrase simply reflects the general period sense of a cigar as a modest reward for a job well done, independent of any single midway game.

Usage today

In modern use the phrase marks any near-miss: a wrong guess that was almost right, a plan that fell just short, a score that didn’t quite clear the bar. It is often softened or extended — ‘nice try, but no cigar’ — and is sometimes used drily or sarcastically about something that was not, in fact, close at all. It remains distinctly American in flavour, even though it is now widely understood elsewhere, and it carries a light, slightly teasing tone rather than a harsh one: an acknowledgement that the effort was real, even as the reward is withheld.