fritter away

present singular third person fritters away · participle present frittering away · participle past frittered away · past frittered away

1. transitiveTo squander or waste.

   Keep frittering money and resources away on such media for as long as you live or want.

   1 more example

   What the school books say about the united efforts of the two great Rossums is all a fairy tale. They used to have dreadful rows. The old atheist hadn't the slightest conception of industrial matters, and the end of it was that young Rossum shut him up in some laboratory or other and let him fritter the time away with his monstrosities, while he himself started on the business from an engineer's point of view.

   c. 1921 (date written), Karel Čapek, translated by Paul Selver, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama […], Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1923, →OCLC, Act 1

   Synonyms: piss away, fribble

2. transitiveTo decrease in an incremental way without hindrance.

   I had been frittering away my money, too, on luxuries; and luxuries are effeminate.

   1890, J[ames] M[atthew] Barrie, “My Pipes”, in My Lady Nicotine: A Study in Smoke, Boston, Mass.: Joseph Knight Company, published 1896, →OCLC, page 35

   2 more examples

   “There is little need,” said the monk, with a meaning look, “to fritter away the time in gewgaws.”

   1838 March – 1839 October, Charles Dickens, “In which the Occurrence of the Accident mentioned in the last Chapter, affords an opportunity to a couple of Gentlemen to tell Stories against each other”, in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1839, →OCLC

   Meanwhile my friend had not ceased to worry about me. His love for me led him to think that, if I persisted in my objections to meat-eating, I should not only develop a weak constitution, but should remain a duffer, because I should never feel at home in English society. When he came to know that I had begun to interest myself in books on vegetarianism, he was afraid lest these studies should muddle my head; that I should fritter my life away in experiments, forgetting my own work, and become a crank.

   1927–1929, M[ohandas] K[aramchand] Gandhi, chapter XV, in The Story of My Experiments with Truth: Translated from the Original in Gujarati, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), Ahmedabad, Gujarat: Navajivan Press, →OCLC