Tuesday, April 12, 2005
to foot the bill
Michael Quinion this week in his excellent World Wide Words newsletter:
Q. Where and when did the phrase “to foot the bill” originate? [John Lanahan, Berlin]
A. It is an odd expression, isn’t it? It’s the kind of idiomatic
phrase that we may use regularly without any feeling that it’s in
the least odd, until somebody such as yourself asks about it.It comes from the mildly figurative sense of “foot” that refers to
the end or bottom of something, such as the foot of a ladder. In
this case, it is a verb that - for example - might once have meant
adding a postscript to the end of a letter. But our sense refers in
particular to the totting up of a column of figures, especially in
an account ledger, and adding the result to the bottom of the
column.
This was often used in the set phrase “foot up (to)”, meaning to
count. The Times of 19 September 1867, for example, had this: “The
united debts of the colony foot up something like £50,000”. And
this is from The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes, by Arthur M
Winfield, published in 1901: “The two counted the pile and found it
footed up to two hundred and forty dollars.”Our sense of settling one’s account was acquired from the original
because adding up the items on an account was something that would
commonly be done at the point when one was paying one’s bill. The
earliest example recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates
from 1819, in an American work with the title Evans’s Pedestrious
Tour of Four Thousand Miles, which was republished in 1904 in a
book entitled Early Western Travels 1748-1846.To start with, it was a decidedly colloquial usage, but as time
passed the associated senses fell out of use and “to foot the bill”
is now a fixed phrase, though still somewhat informal. It often now
has the implication of paying for something whose cost is
considered large or unreasonable.