Idiom
blood, sweat and tears
Meaning
A person's determination and hard work.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“This project took a lot of blood, sweat and tears.”
“You can see his blood, sweat and tears in this beautiful garden.”
“She put her blood, sweat and tears into building this business from the ground up.”
“The athletes poured their blood, sweat and tears into training for the championship, sacrificing every weekend to improve their performance.”
“After years of blood, sweat and tears, the author finally completed the manuscript that would define her career.”
Examples
simple
“This project took a lot of blood, sweat and tears.”
“You can see his blood, sweat and tears in this beautiful garden.”
contextual
“She put her blood, sweat and tears into building this business from the ground up.”
“The athletes poured their blood, sweat and tears into training for the championship, sacrificing every weekend to improve their performance.”
complex
“After years of blood, sweat and tears, the author finally completed the manuscript that would define her career.”
Origin
Popularized through a famous speech made by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons in 1940, with slight modification, but already present in earlier poetry. More information May be an extension of a much older Indo-European poetic formula “blood and tears”; compare e.g. Hittite 𒂊𒌍𒄩𒉌 𒅖𒄩𒄴𒊒𒌑𒄿 (e-eš-ḫa-ni iš-ḫa-aḫ-ru-ú-i, “in blood [and] in tear(s)”). It is common in Indo-European oral traditions to three bodily substances pertaining to a certain theme, such as “flesh, bone and marrow” for the internal solids (cf. Calin (2017), pages 143–146).
Key words
Related idioms
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