idiom meaning - What does "burning the candle at both ends" mean?



I was reading some random book and came across this idiom.
Can anybody explain the meaning?



Answer



It has two meanings.


If you got a candle, and somehow fixed it to something in the middle, then you could quite literally light both ends.


While producing slightly more light, this would waste your candle by using it twice as fast. This is the only meaning the OED gives, with the first citation being from the 1736 Dictionarium Britannicum:



The Candle burns at both Ends. Said when Husband and Wife are both Spendthrifts.



Another sense sometimes used is that if one is working particularly long hours, then one must light a candle at one end of the day, as one starts in the dark of the morning, and at the other, as one ends in the dark of the evening.


This sense though is perhaps a folk-etymology of what was originally meant by saying that such a person is being wasteful—hence the first sense—of "life's candle", however they may perhaps be otherwise thrifty.


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