Word.ws English Dictionary

making ends meet

making ends meet is the present participle and gerund of make ends meet.

Meaning of make ends meet

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To have enough money to cover expenses; to get by financially; to get through the pay period (sufficient to meet the next payday).
    • ... a schoolmaster, whose income being small, he was fain to keep a glass of good liquor for the entertainment of passengers, by which he made shift to make the two ends of the year meet.1748, Tobias Smollett, “The Adventures of Roderick Random”, in The Miscellaneous works of Tobias Smollett, page 18

Questions about making ends meet

What is making ends meet the present participle and gerund of?
Making ends meet is the present participle and gerund of make ends meet.

Words near making ends meet in the dictionary

  1. making contact with
  2. making conversation
  3. making do
  4. making do and mending
  5. making down
  6. making ends meet
  7. making eyes
  8. making faces
  9. making fair weather
  10. making fetch happen
  11. making fish of one and flesh of another

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: making ends meet (page history and authors); make ends meet (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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