to make or break
26
4.5
- idiom
- Informal
:
resultar decisivo
- The quality of your main witness can make or break your case.
- make or break a career
What you put in your pants can make or break your day.
- What you put in your pants can make or break your day.
- What are the ingredients or components that make or break a program?
- It's all about the market, and the market can make or break any deal.
- The people that you spend time with are going to make or break your dreams.
- And it may actually make or break a relationship.
- Yeah, because that can actually make or break a movie.
- And if you don't take control of it, it could make or break you within an instant.
- We, you as consumers, have the power to make or break brands.
- Now, render times are really important for video people because they can make or break your day.
- Like you can do this and it's not going to make or break you.
- So debt is a really important part of the equation because the amount of debt you have can make or break a good cash flow deal.
- And for a lot of people with ADHD, receiving that text or not can make or break your day.
Examples
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The people that you spend time with are going to make or break your dreams.
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We live in a world where mere minutes can make or break a person's entire future.
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It's all about the market, and the market can make or break any deal.
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And it may actually make or break a relationship.
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Now, this next step can either make or break a successful date.
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We knew it could make or break the Voting Rights Act.
Academic text (1994) -
Good quality and service are the key ingredients that can make or break your business.
Blog text (11) -
How you communicate, both verbally and in writing, can make or break your career potential.
Blog text (20) -
She can make or break our careers.
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The quality of your main witness can make or break your case.
How Important
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly inferable from the constituents: 'make' (cause/bring about) vs. 'break' (ruin/fail) joined by 'or' to signal alternative outcomes, so the phrase denotes a situation that will cause success or failure. This binary, compositional logic is regular and easily mapped by learners who know the individual words, making the expression predictable rather than idiomatic.
Etymology
Make or break may come from the image of one important moment that will either make something, meaning 'succeed' or 'build' it, or break it, meaning 'ruin' or 'fail'. So it means 'to decide whether someone or something will succeed or fail'.