shoe-leather effort
- noun
:
esfuerzo físico
- Political canvassing still relies on old-fashioned shoe-leather effort to reach undecided voters.
Examples
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The volunteers' shoe-leather effort helped deliver supplies to every house in the village.
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It took a lot of shoe-leather effort for the journalist to track down all the witnesses.
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The team put in a lot of shoe-leather effort to complete the project on time.
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After weeks of shoe-leather efforts, they finally secured the deal.
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It took a lot of shoe-leather effort for the journalist to track down all the witnesses.
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Political canvassing still relies on old-fashioned shoe-leather effort to reach undecided voters.
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The volunteers' shoe-leather effort helped deliver supplies to every house in the village.
Synonyms
405
1.1
A notable achievement done with a lot of hard work
355
1.6
A lot of steady effort to achieve something difficult
22
3.4
Hard, careful effort to do a task or learn something
How Hard
Surface Forms
Morphology
shoe-leather + effort
The literal parts ('shoe-leather' = leather for shoes and 'effort') do not straightforwardly compose to 'hard and persistent work'; the phrase depends on a metaphor (wearing out shoe leather through lots of walking) that is not obvious to learners. A B1 learner who knows the words might infer a sense of physical work but would likely miss the idiomatic nuance and pragmatic sense, so the expression is only partially predictable.
Etymology
Shoe-leather effort comes from the image of leather shoes, the idea coming from the words shoe and leather, being worn out by walking many miles to gather news or knock on doors. That's why the phrase now means 'hard and long work', often with a lot of walking.