eat someone's lunch

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

eat someone's lunch (third-person singular simple present eats someone's lunch, present participle eating someone's lunch, simple past ate someone's lunch, past participle eaten someone's lunch)

1. (idiomatic) To defeat or best someone thoroughly; to make short work of.
   • 2006 October 2, “A Disastrous 'Upgrade'”, in InfoWorld‎:

     If we didn't rewrite for Windows, they insisted, our competitors would eat our lunch!

   • 2010 November 18, Kate Sheppard, “Outgoing GOPer Slams Climate Denying Colleagues”, in Mother Jones:

     "I would also suggest to my free enterprise colleagues—especially conservatives here—whether you think it’s [climate change] all a bunch of hooey, what we've talked about in this committee, the Chinese don’t," the South Carolina Republican said in his opening remarks. "And they plan on eating our lunch in this next century."

   • 2011, Josh Linkner, Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity‎, Jossey-Bass, →ISBN, page 102:

     It seemed inevitable: Slither was going to eat our lunch unless we upped our game and out-Slithered Slither.

   • 2021 December 13, Molly Ball, Jeffrey Kluger, Alejandro de la Garza, “Elon Musk: Person of the Year 2021”, in Time‎:

     Today, thanks in large part to Musk’s pace-setting, auto companies from VW to Nissan are jostling to invest billions in electric vehicles. Their about-face is driven less by altruism than by a dawning realization that Musk is eating their lunch.

   • 2023 September 27, Spencer Kornhaber, “The Weirdos Living Inside Our Phones”, in The Atlantic‎:

     Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are, indeed, eating traditional comedy’s lunch lately when it comes to funny characters.

• eat someone for breakfast