In this paper Fletcher's database Phrases in English is used to extract frequently recurring n-grams containing the verb 'stub' and the noun 'toe' from The British National Corpus. After analysing some of these n-grams, the paper focuses on the formulaic sequence 'stub one's toe' and investigates this in the BNC, The New York Times and The Independent. Additional searches are also made on the World Wide Web by means of WebCorp. It is found that the phrase is used with equal frequency in American and British English, but that the American use differs in that approximately half of the tokens are non-literal, while such use is relatively rare in British English. It is hypothesized that the non-literal use originated in American English and that it may be spreading to other varieties