bring home

English

Pronunciation

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Verb

bring home (third-person singular simple present brings home, present participle bringing home, simple past and past participle brought home)

1. (idiomatic, transitive) To earn (money).

   I bring home 10000 dollars a month.

2. (idiomatic) To make clearer or better understood.

   Synonyms: clarify, explain, illustrate

   • 1941, George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, Pt. III:

     War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual.

   • 1960 December, “The Glasgow Suburban Electrification is opened”, in Trains Illustrated, page 714:

     The economics of rebuilding all the stations covered by the electrification would be prohibitive, but to help bring home to the Glasgow public that their North Clyde suburban service has been transformed, not merely re-equipped with new trains, stations have at least been associated psychologically with the rolling stock by a common colour scheme.

   • 1977, Richard M. Restak, Pre-meditated man: bioethics and the control of future human life, Penguin Books, page 142:

     This brought home the inadequacies of NIH policy regarding informed consent, as well as its continued reliance on the ethical judgment of its individual investigators.

   • 1992 July/September, “Making Art Accessible”, in Poverty Today, number 18, page 8:

     This incident really brings home the whole question of access, the point of entry for people into observing or seeing art at that kind of level.

   • 1997 June 30, Harvey Blume, “Autistics, freed from face-to-face encounters, are communicating in cyberspace.”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     This was brought home to me, an NT, when I asked an autistic E-mail correspondent, who is mordantly expressive on line, what it would be like to meet.

   • 2003, Leigh McCullough; Nat Kuhn; Stuart Andrews, Treating affect phobia: a manual for short-term dynamic psychotherapy, Guilford Press, page 244:

     It really brings home the amount of deprivation you lived through, and it's very common for grief to come up like this.

Derived terms

• bring home the bacon