meeting of the minds, a
meeting of the minds
the establishment of agreement; complete agreement. After a lot of discussion we finally reached a meeting of the minds. We struggled to bring about a meeting of the minds on the issues.
See also: meeting, mind, of
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
meeting of the minds
Agreement, concord, as in The teachers and the headmaster had a meeting of the minds regarding smoking in school. This expression uses meet in the sense of "arrive at mutual agreement," as clergyman Edward B. Pusey did in a letter of 1851: "Devout minds, of every school ... meet at least in this."
See also: meeting, mind, of
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
meeting of the minds
Agreement; concord.
See also: meeting, mind, of
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
meeting of the minds, a
A mutual agreement or understanding. The term comes from contract law, where it describes the intentions of the parties to a contract. The legal sense dates from the mid-1800s. Jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes refuted the idea that such an agreement is basic to a contract, writing in 1897 in the Harvard Law Review that a meeting of the minds was really a fiction. Nevertheless, the term has been adopted for various kinds of agreement. For example, a headline in an online journal, Technorati, for an article by Scott Hewitt about a meeting between President Obama and Republican senate minority leader Mitch McConnell read, “Is an Obama-McConnell Meeting of the Minds an Omen for November?” (August 6, 2010).
See also: meeting, of
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer
- a meeting of minds
- reach a compromise
- reach an understanding
- agreement
- agreement in principle
- at one with (someone or something)
- be on the same page
- on the same page, to be
- be a one-way street
- be down with (something)