from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- adj. Involving or paying only a small amount of money: a nickel-and-dime job.
- adj. Minor; small-time: "a nickel-and-dime operation run out of a single borrowed room” ( New York).
- intransitive v. To spend very little money.
- transitive v. To drain or destroy bit by bit, especially financially: nickel-and-dimed the project to death.
- transitive v. To accumulate in small amounts: "nickel-and-diming a substantial bankroll together” ( Newsweek).
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. Alternative spelling of nickel and dime.
- v. Alternative spelling of nickel and dime.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- adj. Trivial; unimportant; petty.
- adj. Involving only small amounts of money; small-time.
- transitive v. To harass or annoy with petty demands or for trivial reasons
- transitive v. To weaken or impair gradually or by small steps.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adj. low-paying
- v. accumulate gradually
- v. spend money frugally; spend as little as possible
- adj. of minor importance
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Almost inevitably, governments have moved to defend the Church and to nickel-and-dime its victims.
Leaving off a month saved $7 billion, and it was the first in a series of nickel-and-dime cuts: Leadership also sacrificed health insurance subsidies for layoff victims to continue coverage through COBRA, saving $7 billion, and a Senate deal to cut $25 per week from every unemployment check saved $6 billion.
Test car, a 2009 S with automatic transmission and lots of nickel-and-dime color and trim charges (such as $100 for getting the top in denim blue instead of some other color), came to $31,550.
The nickel-and-dime revenue stream, fed by an overbrimming pool of musical talent, gave birth to the chitlin' circuit, a network of venues where black performers played one-night stands during segregation.
Management also had fiduciary reasons to nickel-and-dime its editorial and community maintenance costs.
I watched him break my mother down for over ten years, and I had to stuff toilet paper in my ears to block out the noise of him raping her up like she was some kind of nickel-and-dime hooker.
It's just these nickel-and-dime taxes that I see in my state of Virginia, but it's all over the country -- everything from beer to wine to cigarettes to telephones to cars.
"Folks assume all fees are nickel-and-dime stuff, that tuition is the main big-ticket item in going to college," said Terry Meyers, an English professor at the College of William and Mary who has emerged as a public critic of fees.
"We simply can no longer afford to nickel-and-dime our way out of the dangerous debt America has amassed."
In January 2010, Village Pediatrics in Westport, Conn., added a mandatory annual charge according to the number of patients in a family "instead of doing a lot of nickel-and-dime small fees," says Jennifer Gruen , one of the practice's two partners.