Meaning of Wherewithal | Babel Free

Definitions

The ability and means required to accomplish some task.

countable, uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“I would like to help your project, but I do not have the wherewithal.”

“Justice was sold at the tribunals, and the most enormous crimes escaped from punishment, when the criminals had wherewithal to corrupt their judges.”

“Big Council meeting! At the bookshop in twenty minutes. Carfare will be refunded. Can we scrape together the wherewithal?”

“"I just can't imagine," Philip said, "having that kind of self-knowledge, that kind of...wherewithal at fifteen.[…]"”

“[…] A single slice of this could leave you supine in front of the Queen's speech without even the wherewithal to reach for the remote control.”

“Although Emma comes to realise she's trapped in a kind of hell, married to a dullard she despises, she lacks the intellectual wherewithal to plot a breakout more sophisticated than consorting with idiots such as Leon and Rodolphe.”

“In political economic terms, the pandemic worked to intensify a development that the decline in the neoliberal order had already set in motion: namely, a conviction that government was the only institution with the wherewithal to address severe economic and social hardship.”

CEFR level