self-made
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Adjective
[edit]self-made (not comparable)
- (of a person) Having achieved success by one's own efforts, with little to no support from family members and others.
- Synonyms: self-structured, self-formed
- Antonyms: nepotistic, cronyish
- My father was the quintessential self-made man.
- 1852 March – 1853 September, Charles Dickens, chapter LV, in Bleak House, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1853, →OCLC, page 531:
- There was I a dragoon, roving, unsettled, not self-made like him, but self-unmade—all my earlier advantages thrown away, all my little learning unlearnt, nothing picked up but what unfitted me for most things that I could think of.
- (of a thing) Made by oneself instead of bought or taken over.
- 1905, Fielding Yost, Football for Player and Spectator:
- Originally each school was bound only by self-made rules.
Usage notes
[edit]Occasionally a wag will point out that a thing that one made oneself (for example, one's own packed lunch) is not self-made in the sense that "it made itself" [no, of course it didn't]. That the response to the objection is so obvious explains why the objection is usually viewed as overliteral and overpedantic; it is natural that idiom often doesn't follow overliteral logic.
Translations
[edit]having achieved success by one's own efforts
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made by oneself
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