Word.ws English Dictionary

make lemonade

make lemonade verb: to make the best of a difficult situation.

Verb

make lemonade (third-person singular simple present makes lemonade, present participle making lemonade, simple past and past participle made lemonade)

  1. To make the best of a difficult situation.
    • ... left to its own devices, the Church made lemonade by taking out ads in the Playbill.2021, Religion Dispatches
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see make, lemonade.

Forms of make lemonade

third-person singular presentmakes lemonade
present participlemaking lemonade
past participlemade lemonade
pastmade lemonade

Origin of make lemonade

From when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Questions about make lemonade

What does make lemonade mean?
Make lemonade means to make the best of a difficult situation.
What part of speech is make lemonade?
Make lemonade is a verb.
What is the past tense of make lemonade?
The past tense of make lemonade is made lemonade.

Words near make lemonade in the dictionary

  1. make it up as one goes along
  2. make it up to
  3. make known
  4. make land
  5. make landfall
  6. make lemonade
  7. make light of
  8. make light work of
  9. make like
  10. make like a baby and head out
  11. make like a banana and split

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: make lemonade (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: “make lemonade.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/make_lemonade. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.