to eat one's heart out
1
8.6
- idiom
- Informal
:
sufrir por amor
- If she goes back to Bellport... ...she'll just eat her heart out.
Examples
-
And the poor kid really deserved a break, mooning around as she did so much of the time, eating her heart out over an uncatchable man.
Fiction book (1995) -
Eat your heart out, Cliff.
-
I followed around after him, eating my heart out... trying to catch him.
-
You could see him watch her sometimes and know it was eating his heart out.
Fiction book (1990) -
Don't eat your heart out, waiting for him to come back.
-
In the cab ride home, Marsha said, "Oh, he was eating his heart out."
Fiction book (1995) -
Watching her dance with someone else, he felt like he was eating his heart out from jealousy.
-
After losing the chance to travel abroad, Maria spent the evening eating her heart out at home.
-
When he found out she was marrying someone else, he truly began to eat his heart out.
Antonyms
How Envious
Surface Forms
Morphology
The expression creates a metaphorical image (literally 'eat' + 'heart') that suggests consuming one’s emotional core, which gives a plausible clue to intense sorrow, longing, or envy; however the precise idiomatic range and imperative uses (e.g. 'eat your heart out' meaning 'be jealous') are not strictly derivable from the parts. Because the relation is figurative rather than fully compositional, a B1 learner might infer general emotional distress but would probably not predict the full idiomatic meaning without prior exposure.
Etymology
Eat one's heart out comes from an old image that the heart is the home of strong feelings. To eat the heart suggests being eaten up inside by longing, jealousy, or grief, so the phrase now means 'to feel intense longing, jealousy, or sorrow'.