year in, year out
1
3.8
- idiom
- Informal
:
año tras año
- The festival attracts thousands of visitors year in, year out.
- day and night, year in, year out
Examples
-
And so we pray, year in, year out, l'shanah haba'ah bY'rushala'yim (next year in Jerusalem).
Fiction book (1996) -
They'll all stay seventeen, year in, year out, but soon I'll be old enough to be their mother.
Fiction book (1998) -
I just love that she does that, year in, year out, game in, game out.
Blog text (6) -
I'm just really glad that people are finding it, and I just really hope that continues year in, year out.
Blog text (24) -
This day in, day out, year in, year out crosses my mind frequently, but I never act on it.
Fiction book (2001) -
They are out there, year in, year out.
Academic text (2007) -
Boxer and Benjamin worked on and on, giving their all, year in, year out.
-
The members of MENC work hard to maintain the excellence of these programs year in, year out.
Academic text (1995) -
"We've had struggles with them year in, year out," Kovacs said.
Blog text (14) -
I don't recall getting worksheets in elementary school at all. Sometimes we might get "mimeographed" handouts, but for the most part, we wrote down the questions from the teacher or worked out of a textbook, and they were used year in, year out.
Blog text (21)
Synonyms
275
1.0
Happens once every year
125
2.2
Once every year
75
1.0
Happening once every year
Antonyms
How Often
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'every year for many years' is directly inferable from the constituents: 'year' plus the paired opposites 'in'/'out' in a repetitive pattern signals recurring annual occurrence. This construction is equivalent to more transparent paraphrases like 'year after year' or 'every year', and similar patterns exist cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the words would understand it.
Etymology
The phrase year in, year out paints a simple picture: the same year coming in and going out again and again, like a calendar that keeps turning but the routine stays the same. So it means 'every year' without change or break.