wear thin

present singular third person wears thin · participle present wearing thin · past wore thin · participle past worn thin

1. idiomaticinformalTo lessen or weaken over time, as from overuse.

   Your jocose wisecracks have already worn thin.

   3 more examples

   Women and gay people, for example, can start to live more freely with the breakdown of patriarchal and heterosexist institutions, while workers and people of color are able to challenge the economics of poverty and the ideology of racism as the rationales behind those notions continue to wear ever thinner.

   1982 February 6, Lester Strong, “A World Cast Adrift”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 28, page 14

   Continuing his recent stern rhetoric, Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg told reporters in Stockholm that many have worked hard to help Latvia deal with its severe economic recession but that patience is wearing thin.

   2009 October 7, Joel Sherwood, “Pressure on Latvia Builds”, in The Wall Street Journal

   [T]he ‘fun’ factor may be in part attributable the novelty of the feedback mechanism, and the sense of fun might wear thin after longer exposure to the feedback method.

   2017, Di Zou, James Lambert, “Feedback methods for student voice in the digital age”, in British Journal of Educational Technology, volume 48, number 5, page 1090