bring home

present singular third person brings home · participle present bringing home · participle past brought home · past brought home

1. idiomatictransitiveTo earn (money).

   I bring home 10000 dollars a month.

2. idiomaticTo make clearer or better understood.

   It really brings home the amount of deprivation you lived through, and it's very common for grief to come up like this.

   2003, Leigh McCullough, Nat Kuhn, Stuart Andrews, Treating affect phobia: a manual for short-term dynamic psychotherapy, Guilford Press, page 244

   5 more examples

   War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual.

   1941, George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, Pt. III

   The economics of rebuilding all the stations covered by the electrification would be prohibitive, but to help bring home to the Glasgow public that their North Clyde suburban service has been transformed, not merely re-equipped with new trains, stations have at least been associated psychologically with the rolling stock by a common colour scheme.

   1960 December, “The Glasgow Suburban Electrification is opened”, in Trains Illustrated, page 714

   This brought home the inadequacies of NIH policy regarding informed consent, as well as its continued reliance on the ethical judgment of its individual investigators.

   1977, Richard M. Restak, Pre-meditated man: bioethics and the control of future human life, Penguin Books, page 142

   This incident really brings home the whole question of access, the point of entry for people into observing or seeing art at that kind of level.

   1992 July/September, “Making Art Accessible”, in Poverty Today, number 18, page 8

   This was brought home to me, an NT, when I asked an autistic E-mail correspondent, who is mordantly expressive on line, what it would be like to meet.

   1997 June 30, Harvey Blume, “Autistics, freed from face-to-face encounters, are communicating in cyberspace.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   Synonyms: clarify, explain, illustrate

3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see bring, home.

   When, in July, 1897, my father brought home the first number of The Railway Magazine, I little thought that, sixty years later, I should still be reading it, without having missed a single number.

   1957 July 28, M. D. Greville, “A Diamond Jubilee of Railway Memories”, in Railway Magazine, page 458