hand to mouth

1. 1.

   with barely enough money for immediate needs

   “they lived form hand to mouth”

Questions about hand to mouth

What does hand to mouth mean?

hand to mouth means "with barely enough money for immediate needs".

Is hand to mouth a common word?

hand to mouth is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.