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In earlier times, wandering peddlers offered townspeople a variety of items and trinkets, such as fabrics, embroidery materials, and even patent medicines. Another popular offering from these traveling salespeople was shoelaces. The fact that such vendors neither earned much money nor charged very much for their wares led to the connection of their literal shoestrings with a metaphorical application of "shoestring" to a very small amount of money. It's still not uncommon to hear of a business being operated on a shoestring (even if these days it's less likely that actual shoelaces are involved), but it's also possible to speak of "traveling on a shoestring" and even "gardening on a shoestring."
Examples of shoestring in a Sentence
Josh Weiss, Forbes.com, 15 May 2025
The owner won’t spend and the GM lacks the creativity necessary to build a winning team on a shoestring budget.
—Tyler Kepner, New York Times, 14 May 2025
Scott Roxborough, HollywoodReporter, 21 May 2025
The film, made on a shoestring $500,000 budget, won the Lion of the Future for best first work at the Venice fest and went on to gross roughly $8million around the world.
—Nick Vivarelli, Variety, 17 Feb. 2025
See All Example Sentences for shoestring
Cite this Entry
“Shoestring.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shoestring. Accessed 4 Jun. 2025.
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