feast or famine
1
5.3
- idiom
- Informal
:
abundancia o escasez
- Living in a freelance world means experiencing feast or famine in terms of work and income.
- feast or famine pattern
They don't want to go through these feast or famine style cycles.
- They don't want to go through these feast or famine style cycles.
- And when the work, it was always like out here, it's always feast or famine.
Examples
-
It's been feast or famine for the White Sox this season, but rarely in the same game as it was in Monday's opener of a four-night series against the Detroit Tigers.
Blog text (23) -
Because feast-or-famine patterns were characteristic of early human groups, hyperfiltration may have developed as an appropriate response to the sudden rise of digestive waste products, especially those from protein digestion.
Academic text (1996) -
It's feast or famine in this business, as you well know.
Fiction book (1998) -
As in other industries, these companies face periods of either feast or famine in business.
Academic text (2006) -
Feast or famine, that was the way of it then; that is the way of it now.
Fiction book (1994) -
It was feast or famine and long, long hours, and it made me realize that being in retail is not the greatest thing on earth," he says.
Blog text (32) -
They don't want to go through these feast or famine style cycles.
-
It would be interesting to overlay this activity over the rise and collapse of civilizations, and other less traumatic but still important events such as periods of relative feast or famine.
Blog text (30) -
Analyses of human skeletal remains can provide corroborative evidence for feast-or-famine patterns among early peoples through the identification of indications of periodic episodes of dietary stress.
Academic text (1996) -
In the restaurant business, it often feels like a feast or famine situation, with busy nights followed by slow days.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Both constituents directly denote opposite states—'feast' (plenty/abundance) and 'famine' (scarcity)—and the coordinating 'or' signals an alternation or choice between those states, so a learner who knows the words can infer 'periods of plenty and periods of scarcity' from the phrase. This metaphorical pairing is cross-linguistically common and follows a transparent compositional logic, making the idiom immediately comprehensible to B1 learners.
Etymology
Feast or famine comes from the simple picture of old life when people sometimes had a big feast and other times faced famine. That's why today feast or famine means a situation of 'lots' followed by 'very little'.