strapped for cash

Example: “I'm strapped for cash until Friday.”

Origin: "Strap," for financial credit or backing, is documented from 1828, with the adjective "strapped," meaning short of money or financially constrained, following by 1857 — both mid-1800s American coinages. Exactly why "strap" specifically came to mean financial credit isn't clearly settled; one proposed but unconfirmed theory reaches for an older rural dairy term, "strip," describing the act of drawing out the very last, hardest-to-get drops of milk from a cow, extended figuratively to squeezing out every last available bit of available credit or cash. "For" was added to the bare adjective sometime in the first half of the 1900s, producing the now-standard "strapped for cash," and the same construction later extended naturally to being short of anything scarce, not money alone — "strapped for time," for instance, uses the identical logic.