Meaning
Said of money - or occasionally a letter, ticket or voucher - that you are itching to spend or use: the item seems so impatient to get out that it feels as if it will scorch a hole through the pocket holding it. Usually framed as money or a note burning a hole in someone's pocket. Informal. Do not conflate with money to burn, already catalogued here - that idiom is about having cash to spare, this one about the itch to spend what you carry. Often generalized to tickets, letters and vouchers. Regional use: General English, American and British.
Origin
A hyperbole of unknown authorship; no accessible major dictionary offers a first-use date, so Victorian or eighteenth-century origin claims should be treated with caution. The image is simple: carried money is imagined as so eager to be spent that it will burn through the fabric. The earliest dated use verifiable in accessible sources is Mignon Good Eberhart's detective novel The Patient in Room 18 (1929), where 'the note from Huldah was simply burning a hole in my pocket' - verified verbatim on Wikisource, and already extended to a letter rather than money, so the metaphor was established by then. Wiktionary's citation trail reaches to 1972 and 2004. Distinct from money to burn, already an entry on this site, which is about having wealth to spare rather than the compulsion to spend what you carry.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- burn a hole in one's pocket
- burning a hole in your pocket
Usage Examples
- That birthday fifty is burning a hole in my pocket - can we stop at the record shop on the way home?
- The voucher will burn a hole in your pocket if you keep checking the sale pages; just spend it.
- Left alone with the petty cash, it burned a hole in his pocket until he had bought biscuits for the whole office.