carve out

1. 1.

   establish or create through painstaking effort

   “She carved out a reputation among her male colleagues”

   Broadercreate
2. 2.

   remove from a larger whole

   “the new start-up company carved out a large chunk of the market within a year”

   Broaderremove

Questions about carve out

What does carve out mean?

carve out means "establish or create through painstaking effort". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

Is carve out a common word?

carve out is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.