hedge one's bets

Language: en

Meaning: (bookmaking)Toplacebetswith athird partyin order tooffsetpotentiallosses.Synonym:lay off; (idiomatic)Toreducetheriskofmaking a mistake, bykeeping one's options open.2014June 24, “Google Glass go on sale in the UK for £1,000”, inThe Guardian:Whether Glass will ever become a mass-market product, and smartglasses take off, is still unclear. Google ishedging its bets, however, with its new Android Wear and smartwatch initiative which is expected to be shown off at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco later this week.2002,Tim Mackintosh-SmithtranslatingAhmad ibn Rustah,Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah‎[1]:He prayed on Fridays with the Muslims, on Saturdays with the Jews and on Sundays with the Christians. 'Since each religion claims that it is the only true one and that the others are invalid', the king explained, 'I have decided tohedge my bets'.2020June 23,John Bolton,The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, New York, N.Y.:Simon & Schuster,→ISBN, page281:I thought that these generals may never have intended to defect, or had at leasthedged their betsenough that they could jump either way on Tuesday, depending on what course events took.2023August 23, Mel Holley, “Network News: Northern begins the search for DMU replacements...”, inRAIL, number990, page 6:At this stage, Northern ishedging its betsas to the power source it wants.

Examples:

No examples available.

Note: the examples for non latin scripts have a high likelihood of mistakes, we do not own any of this data and it is sourced from Wiktionary, the NLLB database and Opensubtitles. Please help us improve this by contributing correct examples. We will be working to fix this issue over time however it is a bigger issue due to the the difficulties in dealing with non latin scripts and grammatical structures(non-romantic/european languages have lower resources as well ).

Validation Count: 0

Sourced from Wiktionary