might and main

English

Etymology

A reduplication of two words meaning strength.

Adverb

might and main (not comparable)

1. (manner) With all one's strength; as hard as one can.
   • 1849, Herman Melville, Redburn. His First Voyage, Chapter XVI,

     […] I found myself hanging on the skysail-yard, holding on might and main to the mast; and curling my feet round the rigging, as if they were another pair of hands.

   • c.1890s, Giovanni Boccaccio, James McMullen Rigg (translator), The Decameron, Novel 1, 6,

     […] he strove might and main to pass himself off as a holy man […]

   • 1907, Robert W. Service, The Younger Son, from Songs of a Sourdough,

     When the sunlight threads the pine-gloom he is fighting might and main / To clinch the rivets of an Empire down.

Noun

might and main (uncountable)

1. All one's strength.
   • 1847, Herman Melville, Omoo, Chapter LXV.

     Thinking that we were about to be taken up under the act for the suppression of vagrancy, we flew out of the house, sprang into a canoe before the door, and paddled with might and main over to the opposite side of the lake.

   • 1852, Catherine M. Sedgwick, The Sabbath In New England, in John Seely Hart (editor), The Female Prose Writers of America: With Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of their Writings,

     The good mothers, like Burns’s matron, are plying their needles, making "auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new;" while the domestics, or help (we prefer the national descriptive term), are wielding, with might and main, their brooms and mops, to make all tidy for the Sabbath.

   • 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XXXI,

     "I feel just like studying with might and main," she declared as she brought her books down from the attic.