Where Does the Expression ‘Pull Out All the Stops’ Come From?

If we say that someone is “pulling out all the stops,” then we mean that they’re holding nothing back and making every conceivable effort to do or accomplish something. The expression is familiar to most speakers of the English language—but where did the phrase come from? What exactly are these stops, and for that matter, why are we pulling them all out?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, stop in this sense was initially “sometimes vaguely used for ‘note’, ‘key’, ‘tune’ ” as far back at the 16th century. Eventually, though, it came to refer to the rounded handles, switches, or button-like stoppers typically found around the keyboard of a pipe organ, which are called “organ stops” or “stop knobs.” To understand why someone might pull them all out, though, we first need to know a little bit more about how an organ actually works.

In simple terms, the pipes of an organ are essentially gigantic whistles, and make a sound only when air is forced or blown through them. Each individual pipe makes a different note (corresponding to the keys or pedals of the organ), while the pipes themselves are arranged in multiple musical sets, called “ranks,” each of which produces a different kind of tone or musical effect. The notes produced by some ranks will have a softer, mellower tone, for instance, while others might be brasher, shriller, or far more resonant.

Depending on its size, the number of ranks or sets of pipes an organ has might range from just a few to in the hundreds, allowing an organist to produce a host of different sounds and tonal textures on the same instrument. Using the organ stops, they can switch between different ranks as required throughout a performance.

The stops on an organ control the airflow into the pipes, thereby allowing them to produce sound. “Pulling out” a stop removes a slider at the base of each rank of pipes, opening them up to the air passing through the instrument (either by bellows or an electronic blower), and ultimately changing the tone of the music being played. Each stop has a name corresponding to the kind of tone color or musical effect that the pipes to which it is connected produce. Stops labeled things like trumpet, tuba, and trombone, for instance, produce harsher, brassier sounds, while the unda stop, or unda maris, produces a softer, undulating sound, meant quite literally to evoke a “wave of the sea.”

A skilled player will often open several stops at once to combine sounds from multiple ranks of pipes to create a richer tone overall. With lots of pipes sounding at the same time, the volume of the organ increases. Pulling out all of the stops—so that every rank of pipes sounds simultaneously—would therefore theoretically produce the loudest, grandest, and most impressive sound of all (if not a rather cacophonous one).

That’s the idea behind the expression pulling out all the stops. The figurative use meaning “make a considerable effort” emerged in the mid-1800s, with the English poet Matthew Arnold credited with its earliest use in an essay published in 1865. “Proud as I am of my connection with the University of Oxford, I can truly say, that knowing how unpopular a task one is undertaking when one tries to pull out a few more stops in that powerful but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman, I have always sought to stand by myself, and to compromise others as little as possible,” he wrote. Since then, different versions of the phrase have cropped up, but the idea—and the musical theory behind it—remains the same.

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