Word.ws English Dictionary

cradle-to-grave

cradle-to-grave adjective: spanning an entire lifetime, from birth to death.

Adjective

cradle-to-grave (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) Spanning an entire lifetime, from birth to death.
    • Unsustainable human activities are creating an open loop “cradle-to-grave” system that cannot continue and has one day to reach a conclusion. Closing the loop for renewable resources is the role of changing the “cradle-to-grave” concept to a “cradle-to-cradle” concept as discussed in chapter 1.2010, Salah El Haggar, Sustainable Industrial Design and Waste Management, Academic Press, →ISBN, page 125
    • Politics should be a cradle-to-grave calling: anything else is mere distraction.2010, Mungo MacCallum, The Monthly, April 2010, Issue 55, The Monthly Ptd Ltd, page 28

Questions about cradle-to-grave

What does cradle-to-grave mean?
Cradle-to-grave means spanning an entire lifetime, from birth to death.
What part of speech is cradle-to-grave?
Cradle-to-grave is an adjective.

Words near cradle-to-grave in the dictionary

  1. cradle-snatched
  2. cradle-snatches
  3. cradle-snatching
  4. cradle-to-cradle design
  5. cradle-to-cradle designs
  6. cradle-to-grave
  7. cradleboard
  8. cradleboards
  9. cradled
  10. cradleful
  11. cradlefuls

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cradle-to-grave (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-cradle-to-grave.ogg.

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