# What does ‘rub someone the wrong way’ mean?

To “rub someone the wrong way” means to annoy or irritate someone. The image is of stroking an animal's fur against the grain. The idiom is 19th-century American.

## What it means

- The image is of stroking an animal's fur against the grain. The idiom is 19th-century American.

## Action steps

1. Common way to describe subtle personal friction.
2. Example: His tone rubs me the wrong way.

## Sources

- [Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898) — Internet Archive scan](https://archive.org/details/brewers-dictionary-of-phrase-and-fable)

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