Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Having or providing only the bare essentials.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Precarious; unsettled; depending on present needs.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective having barely enough to survive, being close to poverty

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective providing only bare essentials

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

from the idiomatic phrase live from hand to mouth

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Examples

  • It referred to his hand-to-mouth existence as a child, when he and his mother and three younger sisters had moved from trailer park to rented room to apartment to rented house with numbing frequency, depending on whether they had managed to scrape together the money to pay that month’s rent.

    Whispers At Midnight Karen Robards 2003

  • It referred to his hand-to-mouth existence as a child, when he and his mother and three younger sisters had moved from trailer park to rented room to apartment to rented house with numbing frequency, depending on whether they had managed to scrape together the money to pay that month’s rent.

    Whispers At Midnight Karen Robards 2003

  • It referred to his hand-to-mouth existence as a child, when he and his mother and three younger sisters had moved from trailer park to rented room to apartment to rented house with numbing frequency, depending on whether they had managed to scrape together the money to pay that month’s rent.

    Whispers At Midnight Karen Robards 2003

  • It referred to his hand-to-mouth existence as a child, when he and his mother and three younger sisters had moved from trailer park to rented room to apartment to rented house with numbing frequency, depending on whether they had managed to scrape together the money to pay that month’s rent.

    Whispers At Midnight Karen Robards 2003

  • So it feels to me like that inventory at customers has worked its way through, for the most part with some exceptions, and we're now kind of more, I'll call it, hand-to-mouth, depending on what their end demand is.

    unknown title 2012

  • Small children may be exposed by hand-to-mouth and direct oral mouth contact with materials containing BPA.

    Barbara Ficarra: Are Plastic Bottles Toxic? Barbara Ficarra 2011

  • But now they are living on a hand-to-mouth basis, as domestic prices are below international-market prices.

    Sugar Prices Hit 30-Year Highs Caroline Henshaw 2010

  • This is because everyone is living hand-to-mouth, and if you have a bad harvest one year, well, you're stuffed.

    My bright idea: Civilisation is still worth striving for Caspar Llewellyn Smith 2010

  • In his short life eleven-year-old Fawad has known more grief than most: his father and brother have been killed, his sister has been abducted, and Fawad and his mother, Mariya, must rely on the charity of family to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence.

    The Book Circle - Born Under a Million Shadows 2009

  • "I used to work in other people's fields, but whatever I got could only provide me with a hand-to-mouth existence," he says.

    Joseph Scott: Irrigation Puts Hunger in Check in Malawi Joseph Scott 2011

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