Meaning
Strenuous physical effort, especially vigorous rubbing, scrubbing, or polishing. A joking coinage that treats sweat as a grease or polish applied with the elbow, it now covers hard work of any kind and is usually said cheerfully rather than resentfully. Informal and jocular; treats hard work with mock-chemical cheer. Regional use: General English.
Origin
A joke that stuck: perspiration is imagined as a lubricant or polishing agent that the worker rubs on with the elbow, so that effort itself becomes a cleaning compound. The Phrase Finder traces the earliest print use to Andrew Marvell's Rehearsal Transpros'd (1672), doing damage with meer Ink and Elbow-grease, and in 1699 A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew defined it as a derisory Term for Sweat, which suggests the expression circulated in street slang before respectable print. Random House, via Dictionary.com, dates the phrase to 1630-40, slightly earlier than any citation actually produced, and Collins labels the modern British sense facetious - the jocular spirit intact after three centuries. Parallel foreign coinages such as French huile de bras or huile de coude show how natural the joke was.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a little elbow grease
- apply some elbow grease
Usage Examples
- You need no special cleaner - just hot water, a scouring pad, and plenty of elbow grease.
- They restored the floor with little more than elbow grease and a rented sander.
- A bit of elbow grease will bring that chrome back to a shine.