self-made
self-made adjective: having achieved success by one's own efforts, with little to no support from family members and others.
Adjective
self-made (not comparable)
- Having achieved success by one's own efforts, with little to no support from family members and others.
- My father was the quintessential self-made man.
- There was I a dragoon, roving, unsettled, not self-made like him, but self-unmade—all my earlier advantages thrown away, all my little learning unlearnt, nothing picked up but what unfitted me for most things that I could think of.1852 March – 1853 September, Charles Dickens, chapter LV, in Bleak House, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1853, →OCLC, page 531
- Synonyms:
- self-structured, self-formed
- Antonyms:
- nepotistic, cronyish
- Made by oneself instead of bought or taken over.
- Near-synonyms: homemade, homebrew, homespun, handmade; see also Thesaurus:custom-made
- Originally each school was bound only by self-made rules.1905, Fielding Yost, Football for Player and Spectator
- Synonyms:
- homemade, homebrew, homespun, handmade, custom-made, made-to-measure, made-to-order, tailor-made
self-made meaning in Tamil, Kannada, Arabic and Indonesian
self-made in Tamil
- சுயம், சுயம்பு, சுயம்வரம்
self-made in Kannada
- ಸ್ವಯಂಕೃತ, ಸ್ವಪ್ರಯತ್ನದಿಂದ ಉನ್ನತಸ್ಥಿತಿಗೆ ಬಂದ, ಸ್ವಾಭಿವೃದ್ಧಿಶೀಲ, ತನ್ನೆಸಕದ
self-made in Arabic
- having achieved success by one's own efforts
- عِصَامِيّ ʕiṣāmiyy
- made by oneself
- عِصَامِيّ ʕiṣāmiyy
self-made in Indonesian
- having achieved success by one's own efforts
- swausaha, usaha diri
- made by oneself
- buatan sendiri, swabuat, swayasa
Synonyms of self-made
- self-structured
- self-formed
- homemade
- homebrew
- homespun
- handmade
- custom-made
- made-to-measure
- made-to-order
- tailor-made
Antonyms
Origin of self-made
From self- + made.
Phrases with self-made
Questions about self-made
- What does self-made mean?
- Self-made means having achieved success by one's own efforts, with little to no support from family members and others.
- What is self-made in Tamil?
- Self-made in Tamil is சுயம், சுயம்பு, சுயம்வரம். See Self-made meaning in Tamil.
- What part of speech is self-made?
- Self-made is an adjective.
Words near self-made in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: self-made (page history and authors); self-made (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); self-made (Kannada 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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-self-made.wav.
Cite this entry: “self-made.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/self-made. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.