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make-or-break
[ meyk-er-breyk ]
adjective
- either completely successful or utterly disastrous:
a make-or-break marketing policy.
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Word History and Origins
Origin of make-or-break1
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Idioms and Phrases
Cause either total success or total ruin, as in This assignment will make or break her as a reporter . This rhyming expression, first recorded in Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1840), has largely replaced the much older (16th-century) alliterative synonym make or mar , at least in America.Discover More
Example Sentences
Sunday's episode illustrated both the peril and the promise of Homeland's make-or-break moment.
What I do deny, vigorously, is that this is a make-or-break moment.
No one seemed to expect Jon Tester to pull it out, but it was no longer a make-or-break race.
Spain is reeling precariously, Greece is prepping for another make-or-break election—and Germany is still insisting on austerity.
The southern provinces are where the make-or-break struggle for Afghanistan's Pashtuns is taking place.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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