elbow room

Idioms  

1. Enough space to move about, as in Two hundred on the stage? There won't be any elbow room. This term alludes to having enough room to extend one's elbows. [Late 1500s]

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

elbow room

“They had some elbow room to cut…. That’s just not where they are now,” he said.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 18, 2026

The shift will likely provide some extra elbow room in the carpool lanes and possibly inspire more drivers to carpool once again, experts say.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 1, 2025

Yeah, you don’t have a lot of elbow room.

From Slate ● Dec. 10, 2023

But conventional accelerators require plenty of elbow room -- kilometers -- making them expensive and limiting their presence to a handful of national labs and universities.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 27, 2023

You have a tendency not to give anybody elbow room in your mind for their ideas, no matter how silly you think they are.”

From "Go Set a Watchman: A Novel" by Harper Lee

Related Words

• breathing space
• latitude