survival of the fittest

Use Survival of the fittest in a sentence

noun

(not in technical use) natural selection.

a 19th-century concept of human society, inspired by the principle of natural selection, postulating that those who are eliminated in the struggle for existence are the unfit.

Origin:
1860–65

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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Collins

World English Dictionary

survival of the fittest

—n
	a popular term for natural selection

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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00:10

Survival of the fittest is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

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American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

survival of the fittest

Those best adapted to particular conditions will succeed in the long run, as in They've had to close a dozen of their stores, but the ones in the western part of the state are doing wellit's the survival of the fittest. This phrase was invented by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology (1864) to describe Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection of living species. By the early 1900s it was being transferred to other areas.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
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Example sentences

When it comes to evolution, survival of the fittest is only half the story.

Survival of the fittest refers only to successfully reproducing in a changing

environment.

History has demonstrated the dangers of a survival of the fittest philosophy.

Survival of the fittest is a simple reality in the game of life.

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Matching Quote

"Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations; these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our armchairs of an afternoon—the most favored alternative method."

-John Austin