give or take
give or take (idiom)
/ˌɡɪv ɔːr ˈteɪk/
Meanings
- Approximately; an estimate that allows for slight variation.
- More or less; not exact but close enough.
- Allowing for a small difference in numbers, measurements, or amounts.
Synonyms: approximately; roughly; about; around; more or less.
Example Sentences
- The trip will take five hours, give or take.
- The event drew two hundred people, give or take a few.
- The house is fifty years old, give or take a little.
Origin and History
Give or take is treated as a later development in the family of paired give / take expressions (for example, give and take). The paired form give and take—used to denote reciprocal exchange—has been recorded in English since the 18th century (and as a verbal pairing much earlier). The shift from and to or (producing a phrase used to indicate an additive/subtractive margin) appears to be a semantic specialization that developed over time rather than an independent coinage.
Earliest Printed Evidence
One line of evidence places early occurrences of give or take inside sporting and wagering contexts in 19th-century American newspapers and periodicals. For example, mid-19th century issues of the New York Clipper (a sporting/entertainment weekly) contain the phrase in forms such as “give or take a pound” (an expression that clearly functions as a margin around a weight or amount in match/challenge notices). These attestations show the phrase in operational usage in the United States by the 1860s.
Lexicographic Record
The compound give-and-take is attested from the 18th century (often tied to British horse-racing vocabulary). The specific standalone idiom give or take recorded with the precise sense “to within; approximately” is cited from the mid-20th century, commonly around 1958. This suggests that while partial uses and phrasings existed earlier, the fully conventionalized approximative phrase was lexicalized and widely attested in print by about the 1950s.
Country of Origin
The historical trail is trans-Atlantic. The give / take pairing in its cooperative, bargaining sense has strong 18th-century ties to British usage (for example, horse-racing contexts attested in Britain). However, early newspaper examples of the specific give or take [a …] phrasing appear in 19th-century American sporting press (e.g., New York Clipper). The standard approximative idiom appears to have stabilized in general English usage (both American and British) by the 1950s. In short: the family of expressions has British roots, but early printed examples of the give or take wording turn up in nineteenth-century American sources, and the idiom’s standard approximative sense is well attested by the mid-20th century.
Theories and Explanations
- Derivation from “give and take.” The conventional view is that give or take evolved by contrast from the older give and take family: where and stresses reciprocity, or introduces an alternative (adding or subtracting), which readily maps onto the arithmetic idea “plus or minus.”
- Sporting/wagering usage to approximation. Practical usage in sporting notices—where weights, stakes, and times were quoted with informal leeway—led to notations such as “115 lbs, give or take a pound”. Over time the embedded qualifying phrase could elide surrounding words and generalize to a freestanding approximative adverbial. The 19th-century Clipper examples illustrate this path.
- Analogy with arithmetic expressions. Independent of sporting usage, a general tendency in English to use X or Y to mean a bounded range (e.g., “two or three”) may have facilitated the adoption of give or take to signal a numerical margin. This is a conceptual, language-internal explanation that complements the usage history above.
Earliest Printed Record
- Representative 19th-century example: New York Clipper, 1863 (and other mid-19th-century sporting notices) contain the phrasing “give or take a pound”, demonstrating real usage in the United States by the 1860s.
- Lexicographic earliest citation for the idiom as a conventional approximator: the conventionalized give or take sense “to within” is recorded from around 1958.
Origin Conclusion
The simplest, evidence-based account is this: the paired give/take expressions have long roots in English (with British attestations for give and take in the 18th century), and specific give or take wordings appear in nineteenth-century American print in sporting contexts. The fully lexicalized approximative idiom give or take (the sense most English speakers use today) is documented from about 1958 onward. Therefore, the phrase’s lineage is Anglo-American: conceptually and lexically British in its family origins, historically attested in American 19th-century sources, and standardized across modern English by the mid-20th century.
Variants
- give or take a little
- give or take a few
- give or take a couple
- give or take some
Similar Idioms
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