Meaning
To bribe someone by slipping money discreetly into their hand; to pay for a favour, access or special treatment under the table. The image is lubrication: just as grease keeps machinery running smoothly, a banknote oils the person so files move faster, doors open and rules quietly bend. Disapproving: implies corruption or at least improper influence. The payment is by definition discreet; handing over money openly is not palm-greasing. Often softened with humour for small tips or favours. The related cross someone's palm with silver is the fortune-teller's formula. Regional use: British English in origin (16th-century attestation); now used throughout the English-speaking world.
Origin
An old bribery metaphor, and the references agree on the sixteenth century while differing on the decade. Etymonline records the verb grease, to smear or lubricate, from Middle English, with the transferred sense 'ply with bribe or protection money' from the 1520s - from the notion of greasing the wheels to make things run smoothly (mid-15th century) - and dates the full phrase 'to grease (someone's) palm' to the 1580s. Christine Ammer's American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms dates the idiom slightly earlier, to the first half of the 1500s, glossing the grease as enrich; the two positions are a few decades apart. Ammer records the variants oil someone's palm or hand, and Collins COBUILD supplies the activity noun palm-greasing. Wiktionary's earliest quotation is much later - Arthur Quiller-Couch's The Blue Pavilions (1891): 'till I sent a friend to grease his palm with the last sou of my patrimony' - and files the phrase simply under corruption.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cross someone's palm with silver
- grease someone's fist
- oil someone's palm
- palm-greasing
Usage Examples
- The clerk hinted that greasing his palm would move our file to the top of the pile.
- In those days you simply greased the head waiter's palm and a table by the window appeared.
- He denied greasing the councillor's palm, but the building permit came through remarkably fast.