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The idiom “cost an arm and a leg” means something is extremely expensive, with unclear origins. Theories include limb-by-limb billing by portrait painters, military demotion, and criminal underworld desperation.
When something is said to cost an arm and a leg, it is extremely expensive. The subtext of this idiom is that the price could be exorbitant, as losing an arm and a leg would be a very high price indeed. One could say, for example, “the coffee place down the street costs an arm and a leg,” meaning that it is expensive and probably too expensive for what it is. This term is more classically used in complaints of one form or another.
While many English speakers use this idiom, its origins are a little unclear. A number of intriguing explanations have been heralded, but none of them are testable. We’re not even sure when the term entered the English language, although it appears to date from the 1930s or 1940s and appears to have been traced back to the United States. However, neither of these things have been proven, so the term may be even older or of non-American origin.
The most implausible explanation suggests that this is a reference to the cost of painted portraits. Supposedly, painters charged extra for portraits that included limbs, using this limb-by-limb billing technique to inflate their prices. However, research has not supported this explanation. Portrait painters did not charge for the limb, and if they did, one would think that documented cases of “an arm and a leg” referring to high prices could be found dating back to the 17th or 19th century.
This term may also have military origins. Many soldiers lost limbs in World War I and became very public figures in their communities back home when they returned. Losing an arm or a leg would have been devastating, but losing both would have made someone’s life extremely difficult. However, turning a tragedy into popular language seems a little unlikely. A more likely military explanation involves demotion, a process in which someone would lose the stripes used to denote military rank. Undertaking a risky enterprise could lead to demotion and the loss of an “arm”, in the sense of the loss of distinctive stripes, a high price to pay both in terms of esteem and salary.
Others have suggested it may have originated in the criminal underworld, where people would say “even if it costs a leg” to describe an act of extreme desperation. That’s not an entirely unreasonable explanation for the phrase’s origin of this term, especially since many things were extremly dangerous around the 1920s and 1930s, from trains to factory equipment. Working in the underworld would definitely lead people to risk an arm and a leg now and then to get ahead.
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