at arm's length

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Idioms and Phrases

At a distance, avoiding intimacy or familiarity, as in Bill hated seeing his colleagues outside the office, preferring to keep all of them at arm's length , or She was friendly only when he was safely at arm's length . Now often used with the verb keep , this term for distancing oneself from a person, organization, or issue originated as at arm's end but developed its current form by the mid-1600s.

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

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