hand to mouth

hand to mouth is the alternative form of hand-to-mouth.

Meaning of hand-to-mouth

hand-to-mouth

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

hand to mouth (not comparable)

In a hand-to-mouth manner.
- Hundreds of thousands of Syrians shelter beneath UN canvas in Jordan. In the irrigated fields of As Safi, these refugees survive hand to mouth, picking tomatoes for $11 a day.2014, Paul Salopek, Blessed. Cursed. Claimed., National Geographic (December 2014)https://web.archive.org/web/20150212214621/http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/12/pilgrim-roads/salopek-text
- Don’t abuse a laborer who is destitute and needy, whether he is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner living in your land and in your city. Pay him at the end of each workday; he’s living from hand to mouth and needs it now. If you hold back his pay, he’ll protest to GOD and you’ll have sin on your...2018, “Deuteronomy 24”, in Eugene H. Peterson, transl., The Message Deluxe Gift Bible, Tyndale House Publishers, →ISBN, page 196

What does hand to mouth mean?: Hand to mouth means in a hand-to-mouth manner.
What is hand to mouth the alternative form of?: Hand to mouth is the alternative form of hand-to-mouth.
What part of speech is hand to mouth?: Hand to mouth is an adverb.

Adapted from Wiktionary: hand to mouth (page history and authors); hand-to-mouth (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: 2026-09-02

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.