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Reader question: If someone steals “a king’s ransom’s worth of paintings”, what does it mean? My comments: It means the stolen paintings are worth a lot of money. Or literally they’re worth the amount of money to pay the ransom of a captured king. Ransom, you see, is the amount of money that kidnapers demand for the return of someone they’ve kidnapped. If the kidnaper abducted a king, then obviously he would demand a large sum of money for the release of his highness. Hence the expression, king’s ransom, meaning a large sum of money. Why is a king worth so much money? We’re talking about olden days here, the expression “king’s ransom” itself dating back to the 15th century, according to The American Heritage Idioms Dictionary. Today, in most democracies at least, the role of a king is by and large symbolic but in days long gone by, kings and queens were dictators ruling a land. Obviously in those days, a king was worth a whole lot of money. He was worth his whole kingdom, as a matter of fact. Well, obviously kings and queens have seen better days. Anyways, a king’s ransom means an unusually large amount of money, perhaps unreasonably so. Unreasonably so, yes, and that’s a point to make about this expression. After all, kidnapping is not the normal way to conduct business with a king, or anyone else for that matter. Therefore, if someone actually does resort to kidnapping and demanding a ransom in return, then it’s logical that they would demand a very large sum, however exorbitantly large that sum is. | 
