"Wrap Your Head Around Something" Idiom Meaning, Origin & History | Superduper English Idioms
0:00 - How to Say, “Wrap your head around something.”
0:05 - Meaning of “Wrap your head around something.”
0:35 - Examples of “Wrap your head around something.”
2:31 - Origin of “Wrap your head around something.”
2:59 - A Surprising Fact About "Wrap your head around something."
4:44 - Conclusion
“Wrap your head around something.”
You’ve probably heard someone say that they are having a hard time “wrapping their head around something,” when they are trying to understand a complicated idea.
You’ll only hear this idiom used when someone is struggling to understand something, however, and not when something is easy to understand.
For example, you won’t usually hear someone exclaim, “I’ve wrapped my head around this! It’s so easy!”
You’ll normally only hear things like, “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this idea,” or, “If you’re having difficulty wrapping your head around it, take a break.”
You may also hear this idiom used in a question, “So, did you wrap your head around the concept I shared with you earlier?”
The image that comes to mind when hearing this idiom is probably of someone’s head literally wrapping around something, like how you might wrap a gift with pretty paper. Kind of scary!
However, the idiom seems to be a physical description, an analogy, of how you might feel when you have grasped an idea or a concept.
Imagine that your head - and the mind within - is a pond of water and an idea is a stone. If you throw that stone into the pond, the water wraps around the stone and the stone becomes a part of the pond.
On the other hand, if the pond is frozen and you throw a stone at it, the stone will simply bounce off. The pond water will not be able to wrap around the stone.
Where did this idiom come from, though? There isn’t much information on the origins of this idiom, but…
The Oxford English Dictionary traces this idiom back to the 1920s, and defines it as “to master a subject despite initial difficulty”.
The idiom, “to wrap your head around something,” is closely related to another idiom, “to get your head around something.” Both conjure up images of a mind physically absorbing an idea.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of use of either idiom is from the July 15, 1922 issue of a magazine, Gem: “Wait a minute boy. Let me get my head round it.”
In this case, “round” is simply the stump word of “around” - a stump word is when people naturally shorten words in speech. For example…
“Cause” is the stump word of “because”, and “gonna” is the stump word of “going to”.
It’s in human nature to save effort, which explains why the phrase, “good morning”, has been trimmed from “g’morning” to the even-shorter, “morning” - and in extreme cases, “morn”!
In addition to talking about your head when “wrapping” around an idea, you could also talk about your mind. You could say, “I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around this.”
So, the next time you’re having a hard time understanding something, feel free to say, “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this.”
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