Idiom
Elbow grease
Elbow grease means hard physical effort, especially when cleaning, scrubbing or polishing something by hand.
How people use it
People use it when a job needs muscle rather than special tools or products: "These pans will come clean with a little elbow grease." It is often paired with a little, some or a lot of. It can describe hard work on any project, but it most often refers to manual work. It is an uncountable noun, so you don't say "an elbow grease." The tone is informal and friendly, often humorous.
Examples
- The old table looked new again after a weekend of sanding and elbow grease.
- My grandmother says no cleaning spray beats a bit of elbow grease.
- Removing the rust from the bike chain took a lot of elbow grease.
Where it comes from
It is a joke that has been around since at least the late 1600s: the best grease or polish for a tough job is the effort of your own arm, as if your elbow produced it. Early uses already treated it as a humorous answer to how a hard cleaning job got done.
Check yourself
1. What does elbow grease mean?
Answer: Hard physical effort. Elbow grease is the effort you put into hard manual work, like scrubbing.
2. Which sentence uses the idiom correctly?
Answer: Getting the stain out of the carpet took some elbow grease.. Removing a stain takes hard scrubbing, which is what elbow grease describes.
Similar idioms
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