nuts and bolts

N

nuts and bolts (idiom)
/ˌnʌts ən ˈboʊlts/

Meanings

• The practical details or essential components of how something works.
• The fundamental aspects or basics of a subject, task, or process.
• The physical hardware items—nuts and bolts—used in construction (literal).

Synonyms: essentials; fundamentals; basics; practicalities; core.

Example Sentences

1. We need to focus on the nuts and bolts of running this project before we dream big.
2. She explained the nuts and bolts of starting a small business to the trainees.
3. The mechanic tightened the nuts and bolts on the engine to stop it from rattling. (literal)

Origin and History

The idiom nuts and bolts—used to mean the practical details or fundamentals of something—derives from the literal hardware items but only appears in English as an established figurative expression in the mid-20th century. Scholarly and lexicographic evidence points to a United States origin for the figurative sense, while the physical fasteners themselves have a much older material history in Europe.

Literal History (Hardware)

As a compound referring to actual fasteners, nuts and bolts are ancient in technology: threaded fasteners and the idea of mating screws go back centuries, with large-scale manufacture and standardization arriving during the Renaissance and accelerating in the Industrial Revolution. Discussions of the physical objects therefore predate any idiomatic use by many centuries.

Earliest Documented Figurative Use

The figurative meaning—”the practical details; the fundamentals”—is first recorded in 1947. This date is considered the earliest firmly attested instance of the expression being used in the metaphoric sense rather than only to name hardware.

Country of Origin (Figurative Sense)

Because the earliest dated attestations come from United States sources and because American print corpora surface examples from 1947, the safest, evidence-based conclusion is that the idiomatic sense of nuts and bolts originated (or at least first entered published English) in the United States. This does not deny independent informal uses elsewhere, but the published record begins in U.S. print.

Theories and Beliefs About How the Idiom Arose.

1. Straightforward Material Metaphor (Consensus View). The most widely accepted explanation is literal-to-figurative mapping: nuts and bolts, as the small but essential fasteners that hold things together, became a natural metaphor for the essential parts or mechanics of any system. This is the simplest and best-supported account and is the one most language historians favor.
2. Influence of Similar Idioms. Linguists note a family of idioms (for example brass tacks, the nitty-gritty) that perform the same pragmatic function—drawing attention to particulars rather than abstractions. It is plausible that the cultural prevalence of those expressions made it easy for nuts and bolts to take on the same abstract meaning in mid-20th-century English.
3. Gradual Adjectival Use → Noun Phrase. Some usage histories suggest an adjectival nuts-and-bolts (meaning practical, workmanlike) may have circulated in technical or journalistic contexts before the phrase crystallized as the noun phrase meaning “the details.” The printed record, however, clusters in the 1940s–1960s.
4. Alternative or Speculative Claims. A few popular sources advance earlier dates or trace metaphorical senses back further; these claims are typically unsupported by primary-source citations and remain speculative. Where no dated printed example is provided, these accounts are best treated as unverified hypotheses.

Variants

1. nuts-and-bolts (adjectival form)

Technology