Close, But No Cigar

Rooted in the real prize structure of American carnivals and fairgrounds in the early 20th century, where cigars, rather than stuffed toys, were a common prize for games of skill like the "high striker," where a player swings a mallet to send a weight up a tower to ring a bell. A stallholder watching a player narrowly miss the target would call out "close, but no cigar" to explain the near-miss without a prize. The earliest confirmed print citation is a 1929 newspaper headline in the Long Island Daily Press, though the carnival-floor phrase was very likely already in casual, unrecorded use before that.