Advertisement

Advertisement

straight and narrow, the



Discover More

Idioms and Phrases

The honest and upright way of living, as in He led a wild life when he was young, but he's been on the straight and narrow for some years . This expression is widely though to come from confusion of straight , “not crooked,” with strait , “narrow,” owing to a misinterpretation of a passage from the New Testament: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life” (Matthew 7:14). The current phrase dates only from the first half of the 1800s.

Advertisement

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement


story of my life, theStranger, The