high-maintenance
high-maintenance adjective: requiring a high degree of maintenance to ensure proper functioning, and without which it is likely to break down.
Adjective
high-maintenance (comparative more high-maintenance, superlative most high-maintenance)
- Requiring a high degree of maintenance to ensure proper functioning, and without which it is likely to break down.
- Requiring a lot of attention or reassurance; emotionally needy
- He has this incredibly high-maintenance girlfriend; if he doesn't tell her that he loves her every five minutes, she tends to break down into hysterical depressive weepy fits.
- There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance.1989, Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally... (motion picture), spoken by Harry Burns (Billy Crystal)
Antonyms of high-maintenance
Forms of high-maintenance
| comparative | more high-maintenance |
|---|---|
| superlative | most high-maintenance |
Origin of high-maintenance
According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, the figurative sense was popularized by the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally....
Questions about high-maintenance
- What does high-maintenance mean?
- High-maintenance means requiring a high degree of maintenance to ensure proper functioning, and without which it is likely to break down.
- What part of speech is high-maintenance?
- High-maintenance is an adjective.
Words near high-maintenance in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: high-maintenance (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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