FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT Definition & Meaning

Familiarity breeds contempt

The better we know people, the more likely we are to find fault with them.

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Idioms and Phrases

Long experience of someone or something can make one so aware of the faults as to be scornful. For example, Ten years at the same job and now he hates it—familiarity breeds contempt . The idea is much older, but the first recorded use of this expression was in Chaucer's Tale of Melibee (c. 1386).

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

Whether or not familiarity breeds contempt is a matter of opinion, yet a change can be as good as a rest, and this tournament is certainly different to the grind through India last autumn.

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“This undue familiarity will prove to be problematic every time, because as my teammate’s girlfriend says, familiarity breeds contempt.”

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When English author Geoffrey Chaucer popularized the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt” in the late fourteenth century, I know he wasn’t thinking about food television, but that’s only because he didn’t live long enough to experience the tropes of the genre.

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Familiarity breeds contempt, but no one argues with each other like family.

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If familiarity breeds contempt, October amplifies it.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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