# What does ‘straight from the horse's mouth’ mean?

To “straight from the horse's mouth” means to directly from the most reliable source. The phrase comes from horse-racing, where a tip on a horse's condition was thought most reliable if it came, figuratively, from the horse itself. The idiom is 20th-century and not in Brewer's 1898.

## What it means

- The phrase comes from horse-racing, where a tip on a horse's condition was thought most reliable if it came, figuratively, from the horse itself. The idiom is 20th-century and not in Brewer's 1898.

## Action steps

1. Used when passing on information whose source is authoritative.
2. Example: I heard it straight from the horse's mouth — the CEO herself.

## 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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Published: 2026-07-18T04:16:34.307945+00:00
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