to burn the candle at both ends
4
7.2
- idiom
- Informal
:
quemar la vela por ambos extremos
- Many students burn the candle at both ends during finals week, balancing their studies with part-time jobs.
That was my early days in in LA, kind of burning the candle at both ends.
- That was my early days in in LA, kind of burning the candle at both ends.
- But endurance is the ability to not just flame out, burning the candle at both ends.
- So that way they're kind of burning the candle at both ends of the stick, which means if you own Nicola, I'm not recommending that you sell and I'm not recommending you buy.
Examples
-
When we stop to consider, we all realize that it is impossible to "burn the candle at both ends" unless somehow we can add tallow in the middle.
Blog text (24) -
You have been burning the candle at both ends.
-
Look who's burning the candle at both ends.
-
You've been burning the candle at both ends.
-
He's been burning the candle at both ends, so he showed up here the other day.
-
You've been burning the candle at both ends for a while.
Blog text (16) -
Freddie, you're burning the candle at both ends.
-
Concern that students are burning the candle at both ends by working too many hours and taking too many classes, thus damaging their grades, does not seem to be verified.
Academic text (1997) -
If you keep burning the candle at both ends, you'll soon feel exhausted from lack of sleep.
-
She realized that by burning the candle at both ends, she was sacrificing her health for success.
Synonyms
194
3.2
To make someone very tired
6
5.1
Work or study late at night to finish something
To make someone very busy and tired with too much work
How Exhausted
Surface Forms
Morphology
burn + the + candle + at + both + end
The literal image—burning a candle at both ends—suggests something being used up more quickly, so a learner who knows 'burn', 'candle', 'both' and 'ends' can plausibly infer the metaphor of exhausting one’s energy. However, the meaning is a conventionalized metaphorical extension rather than a straightforward compositional sense, so it requires some figurative inference and prior exposure to be fully clear to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Burn the candle at both ends comes from the image of a candle lit at both ends, so it burns away much faster than a normal candle. That's why it means 'to work or do too many things day and night and become very tired'.