Meaning
A proverb advising you to adapt your plans, ambitions or spending to the resources you actually have - to live within your means, as Wiktionary glosses it. A tailor literally cannot cut a larger or finer coat than the piece of cloth in front of him permits; figuratively, trim your ambitions to fit your budget rather than stretching your budget to fit your ambitions. Proverbial register; usually given as advice or a shrug of resignation about tightened budgets. The related form cut one's cloth to suit one's purse carries the same image. Regional use: General English; strongest in British English.
Origin
Verifiably a sixteenth-century proverb, antedating the seventeenth-century label often given online. In John Heywood's 1546 proverb dialogue the calculating wooer declares his intent to 'Cut my cote after my cloth' when he has a wife - verified verbatim in the Early English Text Society edition's text on the Internet Archive, whose notes also quote a 1598 pamphlet's closer modern shape, 'shape your Coate according to your Cloth'. John Clarke's 1639 proverb collection has 'Cut thy coat according to thy cloth', the earliest form with 'according to'; sources calling the saying seventeenth-century are repeating Clarke without checking Heywood. The literal practice behind it: before ready-made clothing, a tailor cut garments directly from the bolt of cloth the customer supplied or paid for, so the cloth's quantity and quality dictated the coat's cut. Cambridge's idiom guide labels the phrase UK and glosses it as doing as well as possible with the limited money you have.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cut my coat after my cloth
- cut one's cloth to suit one's purse
- cut the coat according to the cloth
Usage Examples
- With the rent going up again, we shall have to cut our coat according to our cloth and skip the holiday this year.
- The club cut its coat according to its cloth, running three youth teams on volunteers and second-hand kit.
- If the grant is halved, the library will have to cut its coat according to its cloth and close on Sundays.