last gasp
7
6.3
- noun
- Informal
:
último suspiro
- After years of struggle, the company's last gasp effort to innovate resulted in a groundbreaking product.
All of them quote, deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps, she wrote.
- All of them quote, deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps, she wrote.
Examples
-
Indeed, these elaborate funerals could be interpreted merely as the last gasp of the older generation of Chinese in Chiang Mai.
Academic text (1992) -
The last gasp of the establishment.
-
"We're basically looking at the last gasp of Snow White."
Blog text (33) -
"It's the last gasp," he said.
Fiction book (1993) -
Or because this is the last gasp of a dying union movement.
Blog text (28) -
For a start, we can slow down the last gasp expansion of the coal, oil, and gas industries.
Blog text (32) -
This I'd like to think of as the last gasp of the traditional high art classical orchestra.
-
I sincerely hope that was the last gasp of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season.
Blog text (1) -
Barring a turnaround, Friday's episode may have been the last gasp of a foundering campaign.
Blog text (8) -
The team's last gasp to win the championship came in the final seconds of the game.
Synonyms
31
6.1
The final moment when a person dies
14
6.1
A final strong effort to resist a change or attack when defeat seems near
7
6.3
A final big action or event before something ends
3
5.8
A final effort you make when nothing else works
1
6.4
A final desperate try to succeed when success seems unlikely
1
8.1
The final moment before something stops, often the last breath a person takes at the end of life
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly built from 'last' (final) + 'gasp' (a sudden intake of breath), so 'last gasp' readily denotes a final breath/effort; the extension to a final moment or effort is a straightforward metaphorical use of the literal image. This compositional pattern is common cross-linguistically and a B1 learner who knows the constituent words will normally infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
The phrase last gasp comes from the picture of someone taking one last gasp or sudden breath when they are dying or very weak. That's why 'last gasp' now means the final effort or moment before something ends.