Go the Extra Mile

Traces to the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew: "And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain" (Matthew 5:41). It refers to a real Roman law of the time, which allowed a Roman soldier to legally compel a local civilian to carry his equipment for exactly one mile. Jesus's instruction to go a second mile voluntarily, beyond what the law demanded, was a radical call to respond to compulsion with generosity. The phrase existed in this literal, biblical sense for centuries before "go the extra mile" became a common English idiom for effort in general, only catching on widely from the 1930s.