Picture a dusty fairground midway sometime around 1900: no stuffed animals, no giant pandas, no goldfish in a bag. The top prize at the strength-tester, the shooting gallery, the ring-toss — the thing a grown man slapped his nickel down to win — was a cigar.
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Miss it by a hair, and the barker running the game had a line ready, half consolation and half taunt: close, but no cigar. The phrase stuck around long after the carnivals packed up and cigars stopped being anyone’s idea of a jackpot. The tricky part is pinning down exactly when ‘close’ became a punchline — and the paper trail is more interesting than the legend.
Quick answer
“Close, but no cigar” comes from early 1900s American carnivals and fairs, where cigars were a standard prize for games of skill like strength testers and shooting galleries; the earliest documented print use of the exact phrase is a 1927 Yale Daily News headline, with the carnival-barker version showing up explicitly by 1929.
A nickel, a swing, and a cigar
Cigars as carnival loot weren’t a one-off gimmick — they were practically the default adult prize for decades. The etymology research site Wordorigins.org, run by lexicographer and word-history writer David Wilton, points to Robert Machray’s 1902 book The Night Side of London, which describes a Skee-Ball-style game where hitting twenty points won the player a cigar. A few years later, the New York Evening World (June 12, 1905) described a marksmanship booth handing out cigars to sharp shooters. These were adult amusements at adult arcades, and a good cigar was a real, spendable reward — not a kid’s trinket.
So the setup was everywhere before anyone wrote the punchline down: operators ran games just hard enough that most players fell short, and the near-miss became part of the show. Somewhere in the carny patter, ‘close’ got paired with ‘no cigar’ as a running joke at the booth.
The paper trail starts at Yale, not the midway
Here’s the twist: the earliest print citation anyone has actually found for the exact phrase isn’t from a carnival report at all — it’s a headline in the Yale Daily News on May 28, 1927, used ironically about a lopsided game score, according to Wordorigins.org’s citation list. The phrase shows up again in Princeton’s student paper, the Daily Princetonian, in January 1928, imagining a professor scrawling it on a graded essay.
By 1929 it had clearly left campus. The Princeton Alumni Weekly (July 2, 1929) wrote that classmates who skipped a reunion “came close, but no cigar” — a citation preserved on Wiktionary. The same year, the Long Island Daily Press ran it as a headline (May 18, 1929, about a two-time also-ran presidential candidate named Hugo Straub) and, that December, finally spelled out the source explicitly, quoting the carnival barker’s own refrain: “Close — but no cigar!” The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest listed citation is a bit later still: a March 6, 1930 Cleveland Plain Dealer bowling report — “Scott was right behind him with 113, 115 and 117. Close — but no cigar.”
The part most people miss
Most retellings skip the gap: the carnival prize existed for a solid quarter-century before anyone wrote the phrase down, and when it finally hit print, it surfaced first in Ivy League student papers joking about games and grades — not in a circus review. Lexicographers can’t produce an earlier newspaper or magazine citation that beats 1927, which means the phrase likely lived as spoken slang, probably carnival patter, for years before a college wit put it on paper. The carnival-cigar explanation is almost certainly right as the source of the imagery (it’s the only prize that fits the joke), but ‘definitely true since the 1800s’ is folklore gloss on top of a shakier paper trail. By the mid-1930s the line had gone fully mainstream — it even turns up as a spoken gag in the 1935 film Annie Oakley (“Close, colonel, but no cigar!”) — proof the joke had graduated from the midway to the movies in under a decade.
Sources
Wordorigins.org (David Wilton), entry for “close, but no cigar,” citing the Yale Daily News (1927), Daily Princetonian (1928), Princeton Alumni Weekly and Long Island Daily Press (1929).
Wiktionary, citations page for “close, but no cigar,” quoting the Princeton Alumni Weekly, July 2, 1929.
TodayIFoundOut.com, “The Origin of the Phrase ‘Close, But No Cigar,'” citing the Oxford English Dictionary’s Cleveland Plain Dealer (1930) citation and the 1935 film Annie Oakley.
Explore more: More word & phrase origin stories.
close, but no cigar FAQs
What does “close, but no cigar” mean?
It means someone came near success but ultimately fell short — close enough to almost win, not close enough to actually win.
Did carnivals really give out cigars as prizes?
Yes. Early 1900s fairground games — strength testers, shooting galleries, Skee-Ball-style games — commonly offered cigars as the prize for adult players, as documented in sources like Robert Machray’s 1902 book The Night Side of London and a 1905 New York Evening World report.
When was “close, but no cigar” first printed?
The earliest known print use is a Yale Daily News headline from May 28, 1927; the Oxford English Dictionary’s cited first use is from the Cleveland Plain Dealer in March 1930.
Is the carnival origin confirmed, or is it folklore?
The carnival-prize explanation is the strongest supported theory, since cigars were a well-documented fairground prize of the era, but no one has found a print citation directly tying the exact phrase to a carnival barker before the late 1920s — so the imagery is well evidenced, the precise birthplace isn’t ironclad.
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