Word.ws English Dictionary

hand-to-mouth

hand-to-mouth adjective: involving immediate consumption (especially of food) with no provision for the future; having barely enough to survive, in poverty.

Adjective

hand-to-mouth

  1. Involving immediate consumption (especially of food) with no provision for the future; having barely enough to survive, in poverty
    • She has been a widow these six or eight years, and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion.1879, Henry James, Eugene Pickering
    • The Migrant Fleet has little economic base, operating in a state of perpetual "hand-to-mouth". While quarian ships include light manufacturing and assembly plants, they lack heavy industries such as refining and shipbuilding. The fleet has tankers for water purification and oxygen cracking, but the...2008, BioWare, Mass Effect, Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Quarians: Economy Codex entry

hand-to-mouth meaning in Tamil

hand-to-mouth in Tamil

கஷ்ட சீவனமுடைய, போதும் போதாத, அன்றாடம் தள்ளிக்கொண்டு போகிற நிலையில், போதும் போதாமல்

Origin of hand-to-mouth

From hand + to + mouth.

Questions about hand-to-mouth

What does hand-to-mouth mean?
Hand-to-mouth means involving immediate consumption (especially of food) with no provision for the future; having barely enough to survive, in poverty.
What is hand-to-mouth in Tamil?
Hand-to-mouth in Tamil is கஷ்ட சீவனமுடைய, போதும் போதாத, அன்றாடம் தள்ளிக்கொண்டு போகிற நிலையில். See Hand-to-mouth meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is hand-to-mouth?
Hand-to-mouth is an adjective.

Words near hand-to-mouth in the dictionary

  1. hand-tameness
  2. hand-tied
  3. hand-tieds
  4. hand-tight
  5. hand-to-hand
  6. hand-to-mouth
  7. hand-wash
  8. hand-washable
  9. hand-washed
  10. hand-washes
  11. hand-washing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hand-to-mouth (page history and authors); hand-to-mouth (Tamil Wiktionary) (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-hand-to-mouth.ogg.

Cite this entry: “hand-to-mouth.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hand-to-mouth. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.