at arm's length

1. 1.

   at some distance

   “keep someone at arm's length”

Questions about at arm's length

What does at arm's length mean?

at arm's length means "at some distance".

Is at arm's length a common word?

at 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.