bread and butter
16
3.0
- noun
- /brɛd ənd ˈbʌtər/
- Informal
:
sustento
- Teaching provides my family with bread and butter to make ends meet.
- bread-and-butter issues
- bread-and-butter concerns
This is their bread and butter playbook.
- This is their bread and butter playbook.
- It's expensive, but for us, our true, true bread and butter is cold calling.
- I think that, yeah, short form, I mean, obviously it's, it's been your bread and butter to this point for everything.
- And then it expanded into merchandise and CD sales being my main bread and butter.
- But that's the bread and butter of a writer where you're gradually morphing through evolving ideas.
- We, we everyday we think about good mythical morning as this is still our bread and butter.
- Two, I would say for us, our bread and butter is entry level housing, you know, maybe middle class housing.
- And so that's our bread and butter in terms of getting very, very high quality about it.
- The RO ones are kind of the, the bread and butter, big, big grants that every, every card carrying.
- So that's all our bread and butter work right across that we work on on gender, which is extremely important.
- You know, our our bread and butter, pun intended, was, you know, the United the dollar was reserve currency you had.
Examples
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Two, I would say for us, our bread and butter is entry level housing, you know, maybe middle class housing.
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Plainly put, the membership of these parties is now more concerned with bread-and-butter issues.
Academic text (1995) -
I provide the bread and butter for people here.
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Just paying for my bread and butter.
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Teaching provides the bread and butter.
-
There is a huge marine industry that has been our bread and butter for years.
Blog text (7) -
It's our bread and butter here at YouTube.
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They're our bread and butter.
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And because ordinary people care about bread-and-butter issues, these concerns figure prominently in candidates' agendas.
Academic text (2004) -
The burden of proof rests on our shoulders; tenacity and time are our bread and butter.
Academic text (2017)
Synonyms
922
2.3
Money someone earns to support themselves
638
1.0
Money given to help a person or project
104
8.3
Informal name for money used to buy things
99
3.5
A way of earning money to pay for basic needs
16
5.5
Money or food needed to live
4
6.4
Money or work that helps you live
Antonyms
How Essential
3
3.9
- Informal
16
3.0
∞
1.2
131
1.6
68
1.3
- Informal
1
3.7
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase evokes basic staples (bread and butter) and thus has a partly transparent link to 'means of living' or essentials, but the specific conventionalized sense 'main source of income' is a metaphorical extension that a learner cannot fully derive from the literal words alone. Knowledge of cultural/idiomatic usage (or the slang use of 'bread' for money) is needed, so it is only partially predictable for a B1 learner.
Etymology
Bread and butter may come from the very simple meal of bread and butter that people ate every day to live. So, because that food was a basic way to survive, the phrase came to mean a person's main source of income or 'livelihood'.