cut from different cloth

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

to be fundamentally different in character, values, background, or nature from another person or from what one might have expected, with the metaphor drawing on tailoring, where different fabrics produce garments with entirely different properties regardless of their superficial similarity in form; to be cut from different cloth suggests that the difference is deep and constitutive — not a superficial matter of preference or behaviour but a fundamental difference in the material of one's character or formation; the phrase is used both admiringly, to note that someone has exceptional qualities that set them apart from their peers, and descriptively, to explain why two people who seem comparable are actually quite unlike each other in their essential nature, values, or motivations