take to heels

To flee or run away. The youths took to their heels when they heard the police officers approaching.

Fig. to run away. The little boy said hello and then took to his heels. The man took to his heels to try to get to the bus stop before the bus left.

To run away; flee.

To flee. Clearly this term does not refer to running on one’s heels, which would not make for a particularly rapid escape. Rather, the heels are all one sees of a person who turns tail (see also turn tail). Thus Shakespeare wrote: “Darest thou . . . play the coward . . . and show it a fair pair of heels and run from it?” (Henry IV, Part 1, 2.4). John Ray recorded “show them a fair pair of heels” in his 1678 proverb collection, but in the nineteenth century it became a clean pair of heels (with Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others). The current cliché dates from the nineteenth century as well. Henry Thomas Riley (1816–78) used it in his translation of Terence’s play Eunuchus: “I took to my heels as fast as I could.”