Word.ws English Dictionary

sharp elbows

sharp elbows noun: a willingness to sacrifice others to advance one's own ambitions.

Noun

sharp elbows (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) A willingness to sacrifice others to advance one's own ambitions.
    • Inequality rampant? Greater scope for middle-class parents (like teachers and politicians) to use their sharp elbows?2006 January 9, Peter Preston, “Wretched systems”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Questions about sharp elbows

What does sharp elbows mean?
Sharp elbows means a willingness to sacrifice others to advance one's own ambitions.
What part of speech is sharp elbows?
Sharp elbows is a noun.

Words near sharp elbows in the dictionary

  1. sharp cedar
  2. sharp cedars
  3. sharp cookie
  4. sharp cookies
  5. Sharp County
  6. sharp elbows
  7. sharp end
  8. sharp end of one's tongue
  9. sharp ends
  10. sharp power
  11. sharp practice

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sharp elbows (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:

Cite this entry: “sharp elbows.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sharp_elbows. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.