Meaning
To put a stop to something by withdrawing whatever was keeping it going - usually money, backing, or broadcast capacity, as when a network cancels a show or a sponsor drops a team. In its medical use it means withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from a patient with no hope of recovery, a grave and much-avoided extension of the same image. Neutral in business and broadcasting, where it is a stock term for cancelling anything funded; the medical sense is grave and euphemistic, so use it with care. Regional use: General English; American in origin.
Origin
The literal object is old: plug, a stopper for a hole in a vessel, is a seamen's term of the 1620s, probably from Dutch plugge, and Etymonline dates the electrical sense to 1883. Once household appliances spread in the early twentieth century, pulling a plug from its socket became the everyday act that instantly stops a machine, and American English soon put the image to figurative work for withdrawing support from a venture. The freely available references print no first citation for that figurative use, so no first year is claimed here. What is firmly documented is the phrase's medical career: the right-to-die debates of the 1970s fixed pulling the plug as the standard shorthand for disconnecting life support, above all in the Karen Ann Quinlan case - she collapsed in April 1975, her parents' request to remove her ventilator was refused, and on 31 March 1976 the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in the family's favor, an outcome that also seeded hospital ethics committees. Cambridge now records the funding sense as the idiom's everyday meaning: to prevent an activity from continuing, especially by no longer giving money to support it.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- pull the plug on something
- pulled the plug
- pulling the plug
Usage Examples
- The studio pulled the plug on the sequel three weeks into filming, stranding two hundred crew in the rain in Vancouver.
- When the telecom sponsor pulled the plug, the cycling team folded before the Tour even started.
- Trustees voted to pull the plug on the loss-making campus radio station at the end of the semester.