Meaning & use
reap what you sow
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Meaning
phraseidiom
To receive the results, good or bad, of how you have behaved or what you have done.
Grammar: The pronoun changes with the subject: he will reap what he sows. Often used as a warning with will.
Patterns
- reap what you sow
- someone reaps what they sow
He cheated his partners for years, and now he is reaping what he sowed.
If you treat staff badly, you will reap what you sow when they all quit.
She worked hard on kindness in her class and reaped what she sowed when they supported her.
Common combinations
- you reap what you sow
- You reap what you sow, so be careful how you treat people.
- learn to reap what you sow
- The company learned to reap what it sowed after ignoring safety.
- now reaping what he sowed
- He is now reaping what he sowed after years of neglect.
- reap what we sow
- As a society, we reap what we sow in education.
Synonyms and how they differ
- get what you deserve
- This is plainer and more often about punishment, while reap what you sow also covers good results.
- face the consequences
- Face the consequences focuses on handling the result, whereas the idiom stresses that the result matches your earlier actions.
- what goes around comes around
- This version suggests fate or luck returns your behavior, while reap what you sow suggests a direct cause and effect.
Word family
Commonly confused: reap what you sow or sew?
reap what you sow vs sew
Sew means to stitch with a needle and thread and is pronounced the same as sow in this idiom. The idiom is always spelled with sow.
Practice
The manager ignored every warning, so when the project failed he had to ___.
Choose one answer.
Reap what he sowed is the fixed idiom for facing the results of your own actions. The other options change the verbs and lose the meaning.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “reap what you sow”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.