dog eat dog
dog eat dog
Meaning
- a very competitive world
- ruthlessly competitive business environment
- marked by destructive or ruthless competition, without self-restraint, ethics, etc.
- do anything to be successful, even if what they do harms other people
- getting ahead in life at any cost
- a place or situation that is highly competitive
Example Sentences
- The only rule of the marketplace was dog-eat-dog.
- It’s a dog-eat-dog
- You have to look out for your own interests; it’s a dog-eat-dog
- Your company fired you two days after you had a heart attack? Well, it’s undoubtedly a dog-eat-dog
- It’s a dog eat dog world out there. You have to do whatever you can to survive.
- Many colleges are like dog-eat-dog. People will compete at any cost for higher grades and not care if others get hurt in the process.
- That school dog-eat-dog. The students cheat and even destroy each other’s work to get better grades.”
- In the film, business dog eat dog, you’re a star one day, the next day you’ve been replaced by younger talent.
- There is intense competition and rivalry in a dog-eat-dog world, where everybody thinks only of himself or herself.
- In the dog eat dog world out there, it pays to know who one’s real friends are.
Origin
The term “dog eat dog” is a relatively modern idiom that directly contradicts an old Latin saying – canis caninam non est, which means “a dog does not eat the flesh of a dog.”
It is believed that the earliest entry of this idiom in English prints was recorded in 1543.
Later, Thomas Fuller wrote in Gnomologia, in 1732:
“Dogs are hard drove when they eat dogs.”
The present version of the expression, which is still pretty popular, was in use by the early 1800s.”
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