make hay

present singular third person makes hay · participle present making hay · participle past made hay · past made hay

1. literallyTo cut grass to turn into hay for animal feed.
2. figurativelyTo take advantage of an opportunity.

   The White House also sought to make political hay of the release of photos of Bill Clinton.

   2025 December 19, Alan Feuer, “6 Takeaways From the First Batch of the Epstein Files”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC

   2 more examples

   I suggested that this was a mistake, particularly at a time of national crisis on the railways, because it opened the way for critics of the railway to make hay - which Institute of Economic Affairs Director Richard Wellings duly did in an anti-rail article in the Daily Telegraph.

   2021 January 27, Christian Wolmar, “Little-used stations”, in RAIL, issue 923, page 46

   Young-Earth creationism, for instance, instantly struck me as absurd when I first learned about it from a history teacher in my public junior-high school, who confidently told me that the world is only a few thousand years old. That wasn’t what my family or church taught, but Christians who subscribed to those beliefs were suddenly ascendant, and their thinking colored the country’s religious landscape. Meanwhile, the New Atheists were making hay of the fact that such faithful misapprehensions about nature were easily disproved by scientific discovery.

   2026 March 26, Elizabeth Bruenig, “The Evidence That God Exists”, in The Atlantic, retrieved 26 Apr 2026