“Break the bank” now commonly means costing too much. The wording also has an older literal/gambling sense connected with exhausting a bank’s funds, so the engine keeps that source sense separate from the modern affordability idiom.
ReviewedEvidence2 sourcesSectionPhrases & Idioms
Quick answer
It means to cost too much or require more money than is reasonable or available.
Key details
Core Meaningcost too much
History Statusolder bank/gambling sense precedes modern affordability sense
Modern Registerhumorous/informal
Variants
break the bank
Current idiomatic form.
Meaning over time
Bank/gambling sense
The words can refer literally to exhausting or winning the bank’s available money.
Affordability idiom
Modern usage commonly means that something costs too much.
Further guidance
Meaning
Cambridge records the current humorous idiom as meaning to cost too much.
Origin boundary
The current record does not claim a unique inventor or a single dated transition from gambling language to the modern cost idiom.
Sense Boundary
Older uses of “break the bank” concern taking or exhausting the bank in gambling/finance; that is treated as a historical source sense, not automatically as the same figurative meaning.
Sources and evidence
Sources are shown with the role they play in this guide. Historical or style-sensitive claims are kept within the evidence boundary described above.
If something “costs an arm and a leg,” it is very or extremely expensive. The expression is well documented in American mid-twentieth-century material; archival-search research identifies figurative examples in The Record Changer in 1948, while the familiar story that portrait painters charged by the number of limbs shown lacks evidence.
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