The phrase “close, but no cigar” means “that a guess was almost correct or that an effort was almost sufficient.” You can use it to describe a hockey shot that just misses the net, a recipe that’s nearly perfect but needs more salt, or a 99/100 score on a big exam. Rarely is this saying used in the context of actual cigars, though that wasn’t always true. In fact, the phrase was quite literal when it was coined by early carnival barkers.
When you’re playing the midway games at a carnival today, the prizes are typically massive stuffed animals and plastic tchotchkes. But as traveling carnivals rose to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many games of chance were targeted at adults rather than children. Carnival barkers lured them in by offering up prizes such as whiskey bottles and cigars.
An early written reference to these games of chance appears in Robert Machray’s 1902 book The Night Side of London: “Should you score twenty you will win a cigar.” During the decades that followed, it became common for carnival barkers to shout phrases akin to “close, but no cigar” when folks playing the difficult games inevitably came up short.
The exact phrase in question showed up in print in 1929, when it appeared in an edition of the Princeton Alumni Weekly to describe coming up short in a competition. Then the 1935 Western film Annie Oakley featured the line “Close, Colonel, but no cigar!” Though cigars as prizes became less common as carnival games began appealing more to children, the phrase still stuck around thereafter.
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