on a shoestring

Discover More

Idioms and Phrases

With very limited financial means, as in The newlyweds were living on a shoestring . The precise allusion in this term is unclear. One fanciful theory is that debtors in British prisons would lower a shoe by its laces from a window so as to collect funds from visitors or passers-by. A more likely theory is that it alludes to the slender shape of a shoelace, likening it to slender resources. [Late 1800s]

Discover More

Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

When you stop making middle-class movies — movies with a moderate budget, as opposed to ones made on a shoestring or ones that cost $200 million — you’re hollowing out a middle class of people who make them.

From

“We’re working on a shoestring now,” McDonnell said.

From

Yet for beginning drivers from L.A. and Orange County, who are struggling to race on a shoestring budget, that track might just as well be on another planet.

From

Though the ceremony recently lifted its $35 million budget cap for eligible contenders, its nominating juries, which are mostly made up of a handful of film journalists, still tend to favor movies that were made on a shoestring.

From

While Rome was riven by “internecine strife” and Britain ran its empire on a shoestring budget, the U.S. was “constitutionally stable” with “an enormous industrial base.”

From

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

on a roll Onassis

Browse