"balance the books" meaning in All languages combined

See balance the books on Wiktionary

Verb [English]

Audio: en-au-balance the books.ogg [Australia] Forms: balances the books [present, singular, third-person], balancing the books [participle, present], balanced the books [participle, past], balanced the books [past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|*}} balance the books (third-person singular simple present balances the books, present participle balancing the books, simple past and past participle balanced the books)
  1. (idiomatic, accounting) To add up all the debits and credits. Tags: idiomatic Categories (topical): Accounting
    Sense id: en-balance_the_books-en-verb-Q845engZ Categories (other): English predicates Disambiguation of English predicates: 47 53 Topics: accounting, business, finance
  2. To put or keep any closed or conservative system or its analysis in balance.
    Sense id: en-balance_the_books-en-verb-tuIlHj3V Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with language name categories using raw markup, English predicates, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 15 85 Disambiguation of English entries with language name categories using raw markup: 12 88 Disambiguation of English predicates: 47 53 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 12 88
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Related terms: payback, settle up, settle accounts, trial balance

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for balance the books meaning in All languages combined (4.0kB)

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          "ref": "2021 December 1, Philip Haigh, “TfL's deepening financial crisis puts Tube services at risk”, in RAIL, number 945, page 58",
          "text": "I hardly think that cancelling Yorkshire's HS2 line counts as levelling up, but must admit that the South has its troubles too - particularly in London, where Transport for London is facing the prospect of cutting services to balance its books, as the pandemic continues to deter passengers and government appears unwilling to help.",
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        "To add up all the debits and credits."
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        "(idiomatic, accounting) To add up all the debits and credits."
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        {
          "ref": "1992, Margaret Walworth with Donald F. Moores and Terrence J. O'Rourke, A Free Hand: Enfranchising the Education of Deaf Children, page 155",
          "text": "Let us not balance the books of oppression of the deaf on the backs and minds of other oppressed linguistic ethnic and cultural minorities.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2007, John Gribbin, The Origins of the Future, page 76",
          "text": "If you want to make a negatively charged particle, such as an electron, out of energy, you also have to make a positively charged particle to balance the books.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2003, T. J. MacGregor, Black Water, page 358",
          "text": "When you broke one of his rules, you had to sacrifice something to earn forgiveness or to balance the books.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        "To put or keep any closed or conservative system or its analysis in balance."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.