promising

promise (one) the earth

To promise one something that is not feasible or cannot be done. Your clients will come to distrust you if you keep promising them the earth and then inevitably fail to deliver.
See also: earth, promise

promise (one) the moon

To promise one something that cannot be done. Your clients will come to distrust you if you keep promising them the moon.
See also: moon, promise

promise (one) the world

To promise one something that is not feasible or cannot be done. Your clients will come to distrust you if you keep promising them the world and then inevitably fail to deliver.
See also: promise, world

promise to

1. To give one a solemn pledge or assurance that one will do something. You promised to cut the lawn today! Sorry, I can't come with you tonight. I promised to take my little sister to the movies.
2. To give one a solemn pledge or assurance that someone can have something. In this usage, a noun or pronoun is used between "promise" and "to" to specify what has been promised. Jenny promised her baseball card collection to me when she moves. I can't give this to you—I promised it to my nephew.
See also: promise
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

promise something to someone

to pledge something to someone. I promised this vase to my niece. Is this book promised to anyone?
See also: promise
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • promise (one) the earth
  • promise the earth
  • promise (one) the world
  • promise someone the moon
  • promise the moon
  • promise the moon/earth/world
  • promise (one) the moon
  • keep a promise
  • keep (one's) promise
  • breach of promise
References in periodicals archive
The goal of the first stage of PIC, prescreening, is to locate a small set of "promising" alternatives that deserve further, in-depth exploration.
The two steps are repeated over and over in a loop, until the list of promising alternatives contains a small enough number of alternatives (e.g., seven or fewer, which is based on individuals' short-term memory capacity; Miller, 1956; a list of seven items is also regarded as best by career clients; Gati & Kleiman, 2001).
This process is repeated in the same way for the remaining aspects (in descending order of importance); it stops when the number of remaining "promising" alternatives (i.e., whose characteristics are compatible with the individual's preferences) is regarded as manageable.
Where this understanding of the promise as a self-interested, social pact between two parties leaves the supposedly disinterested promise of betrothal is the awkward question that Craig explores in Promising Language.
Promising Language is an interesting and original study that offers new angles of thought on some classic texts and on the legal and moral conventions of Victorian society.
Thus, Smith can conclude that the most morally valuable course of action for Baker to take, as of times prior to promising Classics the position, is to allocate it to the History department.
She observes that there are times when wrongly promising makes it morally obligatory to do as promised, and she classifies the relevant instances of Nepotism as being among those times (177, 177 n.
This difference in reasons is explained by hypothesizing that promising gives higher moral value to performing the promised act than it would have had if not promised.
908, 944 (1937) ("[T]he reason for allowing the gratuitous promisee an action is his injury through reliance and not the promisor's act of promising.").
The government is spending Rs130 billion a year on pensions alone but with all the main parties promising to hike the pension amount, it is estimated that the allocation will have to be doubled.
The parties have vied with each other in promising the sops to the farm sector.
Whether the products offered for sale are pens, vitamins, water purifiers, lottery winnings, or investments, illegal telemarketers prosper by promising customers an array of valuable prizes - big rewards that never come.
In Disconnect, undercover agents posed as distributors of a computerized lead service, promising con artists profits far beyond what they were raking in already.
These con artists often claim to be working hand-in-hand with law enforcement authorities and prey on the victims' ultimate desire to recoup the losses they incurred, perhaps from the very telemarketers now promising to help.
For every "promising" person who is crippled, as Hansen seems to have been, by the idea that moderate success equals failure, there are probably ten people who draw essential confidence from early assurances that they have something special--and a hundred people who are held back by having been told that they had no promise at all.