manage

Etymology

From Early Modern English manage, menage, from Middle English *manage, *menage, from Old French manege (“the handling or training of a horse, horsemanship, riding, maneuvers, proceedings”), probably from Old Italian maneggiare (“to handle, manage, touch, treat”), from mano, from Latin manus (“the hand”); see manual.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈmænɪdʒ/
• (US)
  • (General American, weak vowel merger) IPA^(key): /ˈmænədʒ/
  • (no weak vowel merger) IPA^(key): /ˈmænɪdʒ/
• Rhymes: -ænɪdʒ
• Hyphenation: man‧age

Verb

manage (third-person singular simple present manages, present participle managing, simple past and past participle managed)

1. (transitive) To direct or be in charge of.
2. (transitive) To handle or control (a situation, job).
3. (transitive) To handle with skill, wield (a tool, weapon etc.).
   • Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

     It was so much his interest to manage his Protestant subjects.

   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.ii:

     The most vnruly, and the boldest boy, / That euer warlike weapons menaged [...].

4. (intransitive) To succeed at an attempt.

   He managed to climb the tower.

   • 1913, Joseph C. Lincoln, chapter 7, in Mr. Pratt's Patients:

     Old Applegate, in the stern, just set and looked at me, and Lord James, amidship, waved both arms and kept hollering for help. I took a couple of everlasting big strokes and managed to grab hold of the skiff's rail, close to the stern.

   • 2013 November 30, Paul Davis, “Letters: Say it as simply as possible”, in The Economist, volume 409, number 8864:

     Congratulations on managing to use the phrase “preponderant criterion” in a chart (“On your marks”, November 9th). Was this the work of a kakorrhaphiophobic journalist set a challenge by his colleagues, or simply an example of glossolalia?

5. (intransitive) To achieve without fuss, or without outside help.
   • 2013 July 20, “Welcome to the plastisphere”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845:

     Plastics are energy-rich substances, which is why many of them burn so readily. Any organism that could unlock and use that energy would do well in the Anthropocene. Terrestrial bacteria and fungi which can manage this trick are already familiar to experts in the field.

6. To train (a horse) in the manege; to exercise in graceful or artful action.
7. (obsolete) To treat with care; to husband.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Dryden to this entry?)

8. (obsolete) To bring about; to contrive.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Shakespeare to this entry?)

Noun

manage (uncountable)

1. (now rare) The act of managing or controlling something.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.xii:

     the winged God himselfe / Came riding on a Lion rauenous, / Taught to obay the menage of that Elfe [...].

   • Francis Bacon

     Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold.

   • Shakespeare

     the unlucky manage of this fatal brawl

2. (horseriding) Manège.
   • Peacham

     You must draw the horse in his career with his manage, and turn, doing the corvetto and leaping.

Further reading

• manage in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
• manage in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911

Anagrams

• Meagan, agname