Where Did the Saying ‘Stick Out Like a Sore Thumb’ Come From?

When we say something “sticks out like a store thumb,” we mean it’s conspicuous, obvious, or unusual (and typically not in a good way). It’s an expression you’ve probably used before without thinking—but if you do stop to think about it, you quickly realize that it’s a fairly bizarre thing to say. As Willow put it in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Sore thumbs. Do they really stick out? I mean, have you ever seen a thumb and gone, ‘Wow! That baby is sore!’ ”

So where does stick out like a sore thumb come from? Ultimately, its origins are unclear, but we likely do have one person to thank for popularizing the phrase.

A History of Sticking Out, Sore Thumbs and All
Enter Perry Mason

A History of Sticking Out, Sore Thumbs and All

Conspicuous things have been “sticking out” in English since the 17th century. And over the years, everything from “a lighthouse” to “a fly in the cream” to “a bumble bee on a bald man’s head” have been added to the end of sticking out to create a more memorable metaphor. Sore thumb is no exception: It calls to mind a painfully bright red digit—perhaps the result of being hit with a hammer by a clumsy DIY-er—held away from the rest of the hand.

The sore thumb version of the phrase seems to have first popped up in newspapers in the U.S. around the mid 1800s. In March 1874, California’s The Oakland Tribune declared that an unfinished courthouse dome “may stick out something like a sore thumb.” The phrase even made it to the Australian papers in 1884, when they quoted “a New York trader” who opined that “an advertisement … should stick out like a sore thumb.”

According to Google Ngrams, the more popular version of the phrase at the time was stick up like a sore thumb, which spiked in usage in the 1920s. It was used in the 1926 novelization of a Broadway play called The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart, when one character declares that “A good many people rather fancy themselves as detectives and run around looking for clues under the impression that a clue is a big and vital factor that sticks up like—well, like a sore thumb.” The novel, though credited to Rinehart, was actually ghostwritten by the author and poet Stephen Vincent Benét (better known for his Pulitzer-winning epic John Brown’s Body).

Stands out like a sore thumb was also popular at the time—and it’s that version of the phrase that was snapped up by different author, who would go on to take sticks out like a sore thumb to a different level entirely.

Enter Perry Mason

In the 1930s and ’40s, the author Erle Stanley Gardner repeatedly used sore thumb expressions in a handful of his Perry Mason series of legal thrillers; his earliest usage was in 1936’s The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece: “ ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s the one thing in the case that stands out like a sore thumb, now that I stop to think of it.’ ” In 1941’s The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Husband, Gardner used the version of the phrase we’re most likely to use today: “A private detective in that atmosphere would stick out like a sore thumb on a waiter serving soup.”

Gardner’s Perry Mason novels, which number more than 80, proved enormously successful: They sold hundreds of millions of copies around the world, and were adapted for television (first in 1957, with Raymond Burr as the titular detective, and then again in 2020, with Matthew Rhys). Ultimately, the author’s apparent fondness for sticks out like a sore thumb phrase helped to popularize it even more widely in informal English in the mid-20th century—and conspicuous things have been sticking out like sore thumbs ever since.

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