Hand-to-mouth

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Involving immediate consumption (especially of food) with no provision for the future; having barely enough to survive, in poverty

    "She has been a widow these six or eight years, and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion."

Adjective
  1. 1
    providing only bare essentials wordnet

Example

More examples

"Those homeless people are living hand-to-mouth."

Etymology

From hand + to + mouth.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.