# curry favor
## English
### Alternative forms

* curry favour (British)

### Etymology

Originally from a French poem Roman de Fauvel, written in the early 1300s; Fauvel was a conniving stallion, and the play was a satire on the corruption of social life. The name Fauvel points to the French fauve (“chestnut, reddish-yellow, or fawn”), another sense of fauve meaning the class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, and the medieval belief that a fallow horse was a symbol of deceit and dishonesty. The phrase curry Fauvel, then, referred to currying (“combing”) the horse, and was altered (as folk etymology) by later speakers to curry favor.

### Pronunciation

* Audio (General Australian):(file)

### Verb

curry favor (third-person singular simple present curries favor, present participle currying favor, simple past and past participle curried favor)
* (idiomatic) To seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.
** 1854 August 9, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC:[…] always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; […]
** 1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XVIII, in Middlemarch […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book (please specify |book=I to VIII):Other people would say so, and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for the sake of making himself important and getting on in the world.
** 1896, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 1, in Tom Sawyer, Detective:Poor old Uncle Silas—why, it’s pitiful, him trying to curry favor that way—so hard pushed and poor, and yet hiring that useless Jubiter Dunlap to please his ornery brother.
** 1917, Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion […] ‎:And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who join the church because it is a part of the regime of respectability, a way to make the acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and obtain promotion, to get customers if you are a tradesman, to extend your practice if you are a professional man?
** 2017 October 2, Julia Ioffe, Franklin Foer, “Did Manafort Use Trump to Curry Favor With a Putin Ally?”, in The Atlantic‎:[T]he full text of these exchanges, provided to The Atlantic, shows that Manafort attempted to leverage his leadership role in the Trump campaign to curry favor with a Russian oligarch close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
** 2019 May 5, Danette Chavez, “Campaigns are Waged On and Off the Game Of Thrones Battlefield (Newbies)”, in The A.V. Club‎, archived from the original on 28 January 2021:Unlike Sansa, Daenerys can’t rely on her family name to curry favor; unlike Jon or even Arya, she can’t regale the Northerners with tales of exploits, though that’s probably for the best when it comes to her “liberating” Yunkai and Meereen.

#### Related terms

* fauvism

#### Translations
### References

* Michael Quinion (2004) “Curry favor”, in Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds: Ingenious Tales of Words and Their Origins, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books in association with Penguin Books, →ISBN.
* “curry favor”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
* Douglas Harper (2001–2025) “curry”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.