Word.ws English Dictionary

breadwinning

breadwinning noun: the earning of a household's primary income.

Noun

breadwinning (uncountable)

  1. The earning of a household's primary income.
    • This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.1898 September, Joseph Conrad, “Youth: a Narrative”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXIV, number DCCCCXCV, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publication Co., page 309
    • And the key issues that both batterers and battered women identify as triggers to battering are men's successes in breadwinning and the bedroom – the two Bs.2007, Angela Hattery, Earl Smith, African American families, page 104
    Synonyms:
    breadearning

Synonyms of breadwinning

Origin of breadwinning

From bread + winning. Compare West Frisian breawinning (“livelihood”), Dutch broodwinning (“profession”).

Questions about breadwinning

What does breadwinning mean?
Breadwinning means the earning of a household's primary income.
What part of speech is breadwinning?
Breadwinning is a noun.

Words near breadwinning in the dictionary

  1. BreadTubers
  2. breadwich
  3. breadwiches
  4. breadwinner
  5. breadwinners
  6. breadwinning
  7. breadwort
  8. bready
  9. Breage
  10. break
  11. break a butterfly on a wheel

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: breadwinning (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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Cite this entry: “breadwinning.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/breadwinning. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.