boil down
Britishverb
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to reduce or be reduced in quantity and usually altered in consistency by boiling
to boil a liquid down to a thick glue
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(intr) to be the essential element in something
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(tr) to summarize; reduce to essentials
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Simplify, summarize, or shorten, as in John finally managed to boil his thesis down to 200 pages .
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boil down to . Be reducible to basic elements, be equivalent to. For example, What this issue boils down to is that the council doesn't want to spend more money . These metaphoric usages allude to reducing and concentrating a substance by boiling off liquid. [Late 1800s]
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
“It will all boil down to one thing — is it any good?”
From MarketWatch • May 5, 2026
Thereupon nuclear bluster permanently vanished from the U.S. presidential vocabulary, experts in diplomacy tell us, for reasons that boil down to a loss of credibility once Moscow could match the U.S. in nuclear firepower.
From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 13, 2026
This could boil down to Sam Darnold versus Matthew Stafford.
From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 24, 2026
City of Brandon, a little-discussed case out of the controversial 5th Circuit that sounded, at first, like it would boil down to familiar ideological flashpoints.
From Slate • Jan. 8, 2026
I scooped under the snow for teaberry plants to boil down and pour over snowballs for dessert.
From "My Side of the Mountain" by Jean Craighead George
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
