a blessing and a curse
a blessing and a curse noun: something that is simultaneously a benefit and a burden, or that may seem initially beneficial but also brings unforeseen negative consequences.
Noun
a blessing and a curse (plural not attested)
- Something that is simultaneously a benefit and a burden, or that may seem initially beneficial but also brings unforeseen negative consequences.
- What is that which is a friend and an enemy, a blessing and a curse, which saves life and takes it away; is long and short, round and square, rough and smooth, straight and crooked, hard and soft, hot and cold, and most wanted when it is in greatest plenty; which accommodates itself to all palates...1835, The London Riddler; or, The Art of Teasing Made Easy
- On the whole the Contrabando was both a blessing and a curse; it was a blessing and a great benefit in that it brought the necessities of life to the people, but a curse in that it was training them in intrigue, because the contrabandistas often resorted to piracy along the sequestered coasts and...1940, Olive G. Gibson, The Isle of a Hundred Harbors, B. Humphries, Incorporated, page 204
Origin of a blessing and a curse
From the King James translation of Deuteronomy 11:26 (Behold, I set before you this day, a blessing and a curse.).
Words that rhyme with a blessing and a curse
36 more rhymesFewer rhymes
- purse
- worse
- -verse
- coerce
- converse
- excurse
- immerse
- multiverse
- obverse
- terce
- terse
- amerce
- asperse
- herse
- neurodiverse
- perse
- reimburse
- transverse
- absterse
- accurse
- costotransverse
- demerse
- disburse
- Erse
- intertransverse
- megadiverse
- murse
- nontransverse
- pretransverse
- public purse
- recurse
- renverse
- sperse
- submerse
- subtransverse
- thurse
Questions about a blessing and a curse
- What does a blessing and a curse mean?
- A blessing and a curse means something that is simultaneously a benefit and a burden, or that may seem initially beneficial but also brings unforeseen negative consequences.
- What part of speech is a blessing and a curse?
- A blessing and a curse is a noun.
Words near a blessing and a curse in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: a blessing and a curse (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “a blessing and a curse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/a_blessing_and_a_curse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.