arm's length

1. 1.

   a distance sufficient to exclude intimacy

   Broaderdistance

Questions about arm's length

What does arm's length mean?

arm's length means "a distance sufficient to exclude intimacy".

Is arm's length a common word?

arm's length is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.