Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use breadline in a sentence

11 example sentences · noun

Breadline means a line of people waiting to receive food from a charity. Example: “Every day brings new worries about falling below the breadline.”

Examples of breadline by meaning

nounA line of people waiting to receive food from a charity.

  • I do not think anyone of us can walk by a breadline and see even the most unkempt and raggedy man in the line without saying to himself, "There but for the grace of God."1975, Alex Baskin, The Unemployed (1930-1932), page 4
  • Breadlines and social agencies, while staffing women, employed more men and served more men, making women a minority in the visual landscape.2010, Jan Goggans, California on the Breadlines, page 183

nounThe lowest income level at which one's most basic necessities of survival are met; poverty line or subsistence level.

  • Every day brings new worries about falling below the breadline.
  • It hurt him to see other good ex-servicemen working their socks off and making no-gooders comfortable while they remained just over the breadline.2004, Toby Bishop, Cry Havoc, page 4
  • Having lived below the breadline, having lived with excess, was it about to change once more?2015, Gail Brooking, Coping With Change

More sentences with breadline

  • This life continuously trapped on the breadline was not what I wanted, not forever.2012 March 17, Russell M. Nash, Yellow Fever: An Englishman Falls Under the Spell of the Far East, Memoirs Publishing, →ISBN, →ISBN. From the entry on the breadline
  • The newly unemployed stood in breadlines and slept on park benches under Hoover blankets made of newspaper.2005, Rosemarie Ostler, Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century…. From the entry Hoover blanket
  • We have no right to do so as long as there are slums and breadlines anywhere.1963, Dorothy Day, “A Baby is Always Born with a Loaf of Bread under Its Arm”, in Loaves and Fishes, New York, N.Y.; Evanston, Ill.…. From the entry precarity
  • Anyone would think he was on the breadline too.2014 January 16, Veronica Henry, Love on the Rocks, London: Orion, →ISBN, →OCLC, →ISBN. From the entry on the breadline
  • After all the breadline makes breadliners.1975, Alex Baskin, The Unemployed (1930-1932), page 4. From the entry breadliner
  • For some unaccountable reason a Catholic had strayed away from the Franciscan Fathers’ breadline on Grant Avenue and had wandered into the sheep herd at the doughnuteria.1930 July 25, M. T. R., “Starving Men Get in Battle over Religion […]”, in C. B. Ellis, editor, Industrial Worker, volume XII, number 33…. From the entry doughnuteria

Meaning of breadline

  1. noun A line of people waiting to receive food from a charity.
  2. noun The lowest income level at which one's most basic necessities of survival are met; poverty line or subsistence level.

Full definition of breadline

Questions about breadline in a sentence

How do you use breadline in a sentence?
Breadline is used as a noun. For example: “Every day brings new worries about falling below the breadline.”
What is a short sentence with breadline?
“After all the breadline makes breadliners.”
What does breadline mean?
Breadline means a line of people waiting to receive food from a charity.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: breadline (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use breadline in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/breadline. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.