purse strings

1. 1.

   financial resources or support

   “who controls the purse strings in this family?”

   Broaderfunds

Questions about purse strings

What does purse strings mean?

purse strings means "financial resources or support".

Is purse strings a common word?

purse strings 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.