pull your weight: meaning and explanation
When you are doing something as part of a team, you are pulling your weight if you are working as hard as you should be working, or contributing as much as the others in the group.
This expression is generally used in the negative, to say that someone is being lazy or not contributing much to a project. This person is not pulling their weight. In these situations, the other members of the group or team have to work harder to compensate for the lazy team member
This expression comes from the sport of rowing. Based on someone’s weight (i.e. their size) you can expect them to ‘pull’ or row with a certain amount of strength. If they contribute less than this, they are not pulling their weight (and their team mates will have to work even harder if they want to be successful).
Have a go at these micro-dictation exercises to hear this expression being used in context – how much can you understand?
Listening exercises
Dictation #1
Accent: Scottish
About the sentence
…let your boss know straight away…
Straight away is a useful synonym for immediately.
Notice the useful structure to let someone know something, which means to tell someone something. e.g. I’ll give you a call to let you know that we’ve arrived safely.
Dictation #2
Accent: North America
About the sentence
…a word of warning…
The phrase a word of warning is commonly used to introduce a warning. e.g. It’s a good film. A word of warning though, it gets a bit violent towards the end.
…I’m not going to put up with anyone…
You can get some practice with the phrasal verb to put up with someone here.
Dictation #3
Accent: England (London)
About the sentence
…How are you getting on…
The phrasal verb to get on with something can be used to ask someone about the progress they are making with something. e.g. How are you getting on with your book? You didn’t seem to be enjoying it yesterday.
Extra practice
Here are some questions/links to help you learn the new vocabulary:
- Almost everyone has experienced being part of a team which includes someone who doesn’t contribute as much as they should. What is your experience of this? What did you do about it?
- Be totally honest – do you think there has ever been a time when you didn’t pull your weight?
Photo by Stijn Swinnen on Unsplash
Working as a team is better than working alone but, at the same time, it’s quite important that everyone pulls their weight. Especially in family life. For instance, in order to keep the house neat and tidy, we all should pull our weight.
About the second question, I remember a time when I had to acknowledge that if I wanted my marriage to succeed, then I had to pull my weight in being kinder, more patient and learn to live with the ‘supposed’ tiny mistakes of my husband that seemed to be kind of irritating
Yes, marriage is all about compromise and acceptance!
One tiny correction of word order. It should be: “We should all pull our weight”.
One of the reasons I don’t like working in groups is because there’s always someone who doesn’t pull their weight. At least, it used to happen more often at school and college. Now that I have alrealdy finished my graduation and started a postgraduate, I realized that my new colleagues are much more responsible and I feel that now I am the person who doens’t pull their weight.
Just a question: It’s not the first time I realize that you use expressions with a subject in the singular and a pronoun in the plural, like in this case: “This person is not pulling their weight”.
Does it happen because we are talking about people in general?
Excellent question Aline.
In English, it is now common to use ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ in the singular when we don’t know the gender of the person we are talking about, or if we don’t want to specify the gender. In the past, if you went to see a doctor (and I don’t know if the doctor is male or female) I might just say “What did he say?”. The assumption that the doctor is male is a bit sexist, so it is better to say “What did they say?”. You could say ‘he or she’, but this is awkward.
Some people don’t like this usage, but I think it makes sense. What do you think?
Oh, now I realize that the same happens in Portuguese, but we use ‘they’ when we talk about someone we don’t know. Like, “They say this is good for health”. I don’t know who said that, but I know that there’s someone who said it.
About using ‘they’ when we don’t want to specify the gender… I think it’s completely reasonable and I would use the term in theses cases.
The question about gender in Portuguese grammar is really hard, because we use genders for everything (things and people): there’s a word for a male student and a female student (alunO, alunA), for a male doctor and a female doctor (médicO, médicA), and so on.
And when we want to talk about people in general, we use a male noun (even when there are women and men included). There are people using x or @ to avoid this: médicos (doctors) turns into médicxs or médic@s, but this is a controversial issue.
I think I’ve written too much! haha
Thank you for the website! I’ve been learning a lot!
Very interesting! I hadn’t thought about how this issue would be dealt with in languages with gendered words. Very tricky!
You’re very welcome, and I’m really glad MicroEnglish is helping you 🙂 thanks for participating in the comments!