# What does ‘burn the candle at both ends’ mean?

To “burn the candle at both ends” means to exhaust yourself by doing too much. A very old English proverb; Brewer's records the image, and Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1920 poem popularised it in the modern sense.

## What it means

- A very old English proverb; Brewer's records the image, and Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1920 poem popularised it in the modern sense.

## Action steps

1. Warning about overwork.
2. Example: You'll burn out — you're burning the candle at both ends.

## Sources

- [Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898) — Internet Archive scan](https://archive.org/details/brewers-dictionary-of-phrase-and-fable)

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