Word.ws English Dictionary

blood, sweat and tears

blood, sweat and tears noun: a person's determination and hard work.

Noun

blood, sweat and tears pl (plural only)

  1. (idiomatic, plural, plural-only) A person's determination and hard work.
    • We've poured lots of blood, sweat, and tears into this project.
    • […] for if Princes could keep their own, and that which juſtly belongeth unto them, they could not be urged to draw ſuch extraordinary Subſidies from the blood, ſweat, and tears of their people-; […]c. 1680 [1655], William Drummond of Hawthornden, “The History of the Reign of James the Firſt, King of Scotland”, in The History of Scotland […] , Tho. Fabian, page 29

blood, sweat and tears meaning in Tagalog

blood, sweat and tears in Tagalog

person's determination and hard work
dugo at pawis

Forms of blood, sweat and tears

alternative formblood, sweat, and tears

Origin of blood, sweat and tears

Popularized through a famous speech made by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons in 1940, with slight modification, but already present in earlier poetry. More information May be an extension of a much older Indo-European poetic formula “blood and tears”; compare e.g. Hittite 𒂊𒌍𒄩𒉌 𒅖𒄩𒄴𒊒𒌑𒄿 (e-eš-ḫa-ni iš-ḫa-aḫ-ru-ú-i, “in blood [and] in tear(s)”). It is common in Indo-European oral traditions to juxtapose three bodily substances pertaining to a certain theme, such as “flesh, bone and marrow” for the internal solids (cf. Calin (2017), pages 143–146).

Questions about blood, sweat and tears

What does blood, sweat and tears mean?
Blood, sweat and tears means a person's determination and hard work.
What is blood, sweat and tears in Tagalog?
Blood, sweat and tears in Tagalog is dugo at pawis. See Blood, sweat and tears meaning in Tagalog.
What part of speech is blood, sweat and tears?
Blood, sweat and tears is a noun.

Words near blood, sweat and tears in the dictionary

  1. blood work
  2. blood worm
  3. blood worms
  4. blood wurst
  5. blood wursts
  6. blood, sweat and tears
  7. blood, sweat, and tears
  8. blood-and-guts
  9. blood-and-gutsy
  10. blood-boiling
  11. blood-brain barrier

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blood, sweat and tears (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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-blood, sweat and tears.ogg.

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