The phrase “until the last” means that the outcome is uncertain until the end. It originated from horse racing and is used to describe suspenseful situations, such as in sports or finishing a task before a deadline.
The expression “until the last” means that the outcome of something is not decided until the last moment. An example of this idiom in a sentence would be: “The basketball game was very exciting because it went all the way to the limit.” This means that one team did not have a clear lead over the other team during the game. The match was so close that spectators couldn’t tell who was going to win until the very last second.
This English proverb is often used to describe something that didn’t happen until the very last moment, such as in a newspaper article written just before the deadline. In the case of a college report, a student might say, “I didn’t finish my report until five minutes before class started. I really went down to the wire with this one. ”
It would appear that the idiom has its origins in horse racing. A long piece of tape or paper would be placed along the finish line on race tracks. This was used so that it would be easier to determine the winner of a nearby horse race. The horse that gets there first touches the ribbon or card first and wraps itself around the front of the winning horse. If two or more horses were neck-and-neck to the finish, the winner often could not be determined until one of them touched the wire, then the race descended to the wire.
Generally, this term is used to describe a suspenseful situation, and is commonly used in English-speaking countries by many sports commentators to describe various sporting events. In July 1889, Scribner’s Magazine published one of the first uses of this phrase. As he described a very close horse race and how the horses Timarch and Petrel were head to head, with the two horses running right up to the wire, all cheered by the applause of the spectators. Since then, the expression has become a common English idiom.
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