to pull someone's leg
1
4.1
- idiom
- Informal
:
tomar el pelo
- He was just pulling your leg when he said he won the lottery.
Examples
-
I'm just pulling your leg.
-
Somebody must be pulling your leg.
-
That man is trying to pull your leg.
-
- Are you pulling my leg?
-
I was pulling your leg.
-
Come on, I'm pulling your leg.
-
He's just pulling your leg.
-
- You're pulling my leg.
-
You're trying to pull my leg, aren't you?
-
Don't believe everything he tells you; he's just pulling your leg.
Synonyms
∞
3.5
To tease someone in a friendly, playful way
307
2.3
Laugh at someone or say things that make them feel embarrassed
245
1.9
To make fun of someone in a way that annoys them
80
2.9
Say something funny, often unkind, about someone or something
25
3.9
To make jokes about someone to make them look silly
23
3.4
To make jokes about someone, sometimes to be playful and sometimes to be unkind
15
3.0
To make someone believe something that is not true as a joke
7
6.5
Make fun of someone in a friendly, playful way
7
9.3
To tease or criticize someone in a friendly way
6
2.8
To fool someone as a joke
5
3.2
To trick someone in a friendly way to make them laugh
2
4.5
To trick people into believing something false
2
7.5
To laugh at someone and say unkind things about them
1
7.5
To joke or tease someone in a friendly way
1
8.1
To tease someone in a playful way
1
8.7
Tease someone to make them react
1
9.0
To tease or nag someone, often in a playful way
To tease someone by saying something that is not true as a joke
To tease someone by joking about them in a friendly way
Tease someone by making jokes about them
To tease or nag someone in a way that annoys them
Antonyms
How Playful
Surface Forms
Morphology
The overall meaning 'to tease or joke' cannot be derived from the literal constituents: 'pull' (apply force), 'someone's' (possessive), and 'leg' (a limb) provide no compositional clue to joking or deception. This is a conventionalized idiom whose sense is unpredictable from its parts (even if some languages have analogous idioms), so a B1 learner who only knows the individual words is unlikely to infer the meaning.
Etymology
The idiom pull someone's leg may come from a simple prank: someone would gently pull another person's leg so they would stumble and look silly, making people laugh. That's why today it means 'to tease' or 'to tell someone something not true as a joke'.