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 does boil down to customer service," she believes.
From BBC ● Aug. 18, 2026
“You’ve got three very different candidates, each with very different constituencies, all within the margin of error. It’s going to boil down to turnout,” said Mark DiCamillo, the director of Berkeley IGS polls.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 28, 2026
“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
We used to discuss some of these matters, but we both knew the question would boil down to my saying, “Ted, you decide.”
From "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan
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.
