far cry from something

Example: “The tiny hotel room was a far cry from the photos on the website.”

Origin: Most often traced to the Scottish Highlands, where a clan's messengers or criers carried news and summonses across its territory, and "a far cry" measured distance the way rural, largely unmapped societies often did — not in exact units, but in how far a shout could carry and still be heard. Walter Scott's 1817 novel Rob Roy popularized the specific saying "a far cry to Lochow," a boast of the Campbell clan that their ancestral lands lay safely beyond any invading army's reach. The literal sense of a genuinely long distance had, by the late 1800s, already broadened into the modern figurative one: something so different from another thing that comparing them feels like measuring an impossibly long gap. That said, the Highland-crier story is repeated more often than it's actually verified, and at least one source explicitly flags it as unconfirmed.