“Pull Someone’s Leg” — Origin, Meaning & First Recorded Use

The popular story

Two dramatic origin stories circulate for pull someone’s leg. The first is macabre: at public executions such as those at Tyburn, friends or hired helpers supposedly pulled on the hanged person’s legs to hasten death, and this act of “leg-pulling” somehow drifted into meaning a joke. The second is criminal: 19th-century London thieves are said to have used a “tripper up” who yanked a victim’s legs from under them so an accomplice could rob the fallen mark. Both stories are repeated across the internet as settled fact.

What the record shows

The written record tells a much plainer tale. The phrase surfaces in English in the middle of the 1800s. The earliest reasonably reliable printed example is from an anonymous 1859 novel about the British merchant navy, Always Ready; or, Every One in His Pride, where “both brothers commenced ‘pulling his leg’ by criticising his rig, asking him ‘Who his hatter was?'” The oldest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is later still — the Wellsboro Agitator of Pennsylvania, 20 February 1883. A much-quoted 1821 example from the Diary of James Gallatin is worthless as evidence, because that diary is generally considered a modern fabrication.

The verdict

Both crowd-pleasing origin stories are folk etymology. There is no documentary evidence connecting the idiom to Tyburn hangings, and the emotional mismatch is glaring: a phrase for gentle teasing is unlikely to have grown from helping a person die. The thief-tripping story fits the literal words better, but it too rests on assertion rather than any dated source tying the practice to the phrase. On the wider question — what actually gave rise to the expression — the honest verdict is origin unknown. Etymologists have called it one of the genuine unsolved puzzles of English idiom.

What we don’t know

We don’t know who first used it, in what setting, or what mental image it started from. The literal sense — physically tugging a leg to trip, unbalance, or make a fool of someone — is an attractive bridge to the figurative meaning, and Scots dialect had “draw the leg of” for “make a fool of.” But attractive is not the same as proven. No first user, no origin scene, and no explanatory quotation has ever been found.

How it changed

Whatever its start, the phrase settled quickly into its modern shape. The early uses already carry the sense of ribbing or winding someone up rather than any literal violence. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was common on both sides of the Atlantic, and the reflexive check “you’re pulling my leg” — meaning “you’re not serious” — became a fixed conversational reply.

Usage today

Today the idiom is entirely playful and carries no hint of its speculative dark backstories. It signals affectionate teasing or a harmless hoax: “Relax — nobody’s really cancelling the holiday. Your brother is just pulling your leg.” If someone tells you the phrase comes from the gallows, you can now, gently, pull their leg right back — and cite the record while you do it.