work one's fingers to the bone

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Also, work one's tail or butt off. Exert oneself, labor very hard, as in She's working her fingers to the bone to support her children, or I work my tail off and then the government takes half my income in taxes. The first hyperbole, with its image of working the skin and flesh off one's fingers, dates from the mid-1800s; the less polite variants date from the first half of the 1900s.

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Words nearby work one's fingers to the bone

workmen's compensation, workmen's compensation insurance, work of art, work off, work on, work one's fingers to the bone, work one's way, work order, workout, work over, workpeople

How to use work one's fingers to the bone in a sentence

Added to drinking water at concentrations of around one part per million, fluoride ions stick to dental plaque.
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In his view, a writer has only one duty: to be present in his books.
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Yet this, in the end, is a book from which one emerges sad, gloomy, disenchanted, at least if we agree to take it seriously.
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France 24 is providing live, round-the-clock coverage of both scenes as they progress.
LIVE Coverage of the Paris Terror Attacks||January 9, 2015|DAILY BEAST

If anything the work the two cops and the maintenance guy were doing deserves more respect and probably helped a lot more people.
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Practise gliding in the form of inflection, or slide, from one extreme of pitch to another.
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He alludes to it as one of their evil customs and used by them to produce insensibility.
Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce|E. R. Billings.
There was a rumor that Alessandro and his father had both died; but no one knew anything certainly.
Ramona|Helen Hunt Jackson
Truth is a torch, but one of enormous size; so that we slink past it in rather a blinking fashion for fear it should burn us.
Pearls of Thought|Maturin M. Ballou
Under the one-sixth they appear as slender, highly refractive fibers with double contour and, often, curled or split ends.
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