See might and main on Wiktionary
{
"etymology_text": "A reduplication of two words meaning strength.",
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"pos": "adv",
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"examples": [
{
"ref": "1849, Herman Melville, “Chapter XVI”, in Redburn: His First Voyage. […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC:",
"text": "[…] I found myself hanging on the skysail-yard, holding on might and main to the mast; and curling my feet round the rigging, as if they were another pair of hands.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"text": "c.1890s, Giovanni Boccaccio, James McMullen Rigg (translator), The Decameron, Novel 1, 6,\n[…] he strove might and main to pass himself off as a holy man […]"
},
{
"ref": "1907, Robert W[illiam] Service, “The Younger Son”, in Songs of a Sourdough, Toronto, Ont.: William Briggs, →OCLC, stanza 4, page 61:",
"text": "When the sunlight threads the pine-gloom he is fighting might and main / To clinch the rivets of an Empire down.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"With all one's strength; as hard as one can."
],
"id": "en-might_and_main-en-adv-Fa336Vqf",
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"tags": [
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"word": "might and main"
}
{
"etymology_text": "A reduplication of two words meaning strength.",
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"pos": "noun",
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"_dis": "42 58",
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"_dis": "26 74",
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"_dis": "18 82",
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"examples": [
{
"text": "with might and main",
"type": "example"
},
{
"ref": "1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, “(please specify the chapter name)”, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1837, →OCLC:",
"text": "Mr. Winkle, catching sight of a lady's face at the window of the sedan, turned hastily round, plied the knocker with all his might and main, and called frantically upon the chairman to take the chair away again.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1847 March 30, Herman Melville, “The Hegira, or Flight”, in Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas; […], London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 246:",
"text": "Thinking that we were about to be taken up under the act for the suppression of vagrancy, we flew out of the house, sprang into a canoe before the door, and paddled with might and main over to the opposite side of the lake.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1852, Catherine M. Sedgwick, “The Sabbath In New England”, in John Seely Hart, editor, The Female Prose Writers of America: With Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of their Writings:",
"text": "The good mothers, like Burns’s matron, are plying their needles, making \"auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new;\" while the domestics, or help (we prefer the national descriptive term), are wielding, with might and main, their brooms and mops, to make all tidy for the Sabbath.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1908 June, L[ucy] M[aud] Montgomery, chapter XXXI, in Anne of Green Gables, Boston, Mass.: L[ouis] C[oues] Page & Company, published August 1909 (11th printing), →OCLC:",
"text": "\"I feel just like studying with might and main,\" she declared as she brought her books down from the attic.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2023 August 15, Senan Molony, “Give McEntee an accountability holiday on street crime–for now”, in Irish Independent, page 8:",
"text": "Another horrific attack on tourists to Dublin in the city centre and in the height of summer. Gardaí are doing their job with might and main.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"All one's strength."
],
"id": "en-might_and_main-en-noun-2CJmqy01",
"links": [
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]
],
"related": [
{
"word": "horse and foot"
}
],
"tags": [
"uncountable"
]
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],
"word": "might and main"
}
{
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"English coordinated pairs",
"English entries with incorrect language header",
"English lemmas",
"English manner adverbs",
"English multiword terms",
"English nouns",
"English uncomparable adverbs",
"English uncountable nouns",
"Pages with 1 entry",
"Pages with entries"
],
"etymology_text": "A reduplication of two words meaning strength.",
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"ref": "1849, Herman Melville, “Chapter XVI”, in Redburn: His First Voyage. […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC:",
"text": "[…] I found myself hanging on the skysail-yard, holding on might and main to the mast; and curling my feet round the rigging, as if they were another pair of hands.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"text": "c.1890s, Giovanni Boccaccio, James McMullen Rigg (translator), The Decameron, Novel 1, 6,\n[…] he strove might and main to pass himself off as a holy man […]"
},
{
"ref": "1907, Robert W[illiam] Service, “The Younger Son”, in Songs of a Sourdough, Toronto, Ont.: William Briggs, →OCLC, stanza 4, page 61:",
"text": "When the sunlight threads the pine-gloom he is fighting might and main / To clinch the rivets of an Empire down.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"With all one's strength; as hard as one can."
],
"links": [
[
"strength",
"strength"
]
],
"tags": [
"not-comparable"
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}
],
"word": "might and main"
}
{
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"English multiword terms",
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],
"etymology_text": "A reduplication of two words meaning strength.",
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"pos": "noun",
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"examples": [
{
"text": "with might and main",
"type": "example"
},
{
"ref": "1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, “(please specify the chapter name)”, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1837, →OCLC:",
"text": "Mr. Winkle, catching sight of a lady's face at the window of the sedan, turned hastily round, plied the knocker with all his might and main, and called frantically upon the chairman to take the chair away again.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1847 March 30, Herman Melville, “The Hegira, or Flight”, in Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas; […], London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 246:",
"text": "Thinking that we were about to be taken up under the act for the suppression of vagrancy, we flew out of the house, sprang into a canoe before the door, and paddled with might and main over to the opposite side of the lake.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1852, Catherine M. Sedgwick, “The Sabbath In New England”, in John Seely Hart, editor, The Female Prose Writers of America: With Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of their Writings:",
"text": "The good mothers, like Burns’s matron, are plying their needles, making \"auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new;\" while the domestics, or help (we prefer the national descriptive term), are wielding, with might and main, their brooms and mops, to make all tidy for the Sabbath.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1908 June, L[ucy] M[aud] Montgomery, chapter XXXI, in Anne of Green Gables, Boston, Mass.: L[ouis] C[oues] Page & Company, published August 1909 (11th printing), →OCLC:",
"text": "\"I feel just like studying with might and main,\" she declared as she brought her books down from the attic.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2023 August 15, Senan Molony, “Give McEntee an accountability holiday on street crime–for now”, in Irish Independent, page 8:",
"text": "Another horrific attack on tourists to Dublin in the city centre and in the height of summer. Gardaí are doing their job with might and main.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"All one's strength."
],
"links": [
[
"strength",
"strength"
]
],
"tags": [
"uncountable"
]
}
],
"word": "might and main"
}
Download raw JSONL data for might and main meaning in All languages combined (4.4kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-11-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-10-02 using wiktextract (fbeafe8 and 7f03c9b). 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.