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What is "hand-to-mouth"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
hand-to-mouth
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a hand-to-mouth existence (=with just enough food or money to live)
▪ The survivors lived a hand-to-mouth existence until they were rescued.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Alice thought it sounded a hand-to-mouth existence.
▪ As always, this winter most labourers will live a hand-to-mouth existence until the grapes are ready for thinning in late August.
▪ Therefore, in the bleak aftermath of war, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence in the less attractive areas of London.
Wiktionary
hand-to-mouth

a. having barely enough to survive, being close to poverty

WordNet
hand-to-mouth

adj. providing only bare essentials; "a hand-to-mouth existence" [syn: hand-to-mouth(a)]

Usage examples of "hand-to-mouth".

Chelsea was comparatively near to the heart of things, and I had heard that one might find there artistic people whose hand-to-mouth, Saturnalian existence was redolent of that exquisite gaiety which so attracted my own casual temperament.

Could culture ever make headway among the blind partisanships, the hand-to-mouth mentality, the cheap excitements of this town life?

I can get plenty of journalistic and broadcasting work, it is rather a hand-to-mouth existence.

As they were hardly ever given food rations by their own army and lived hand-to-mouth at their roadblocks and in their stone-slab cantonments up and down the streets, it was assumed they had been drinking polluted water.

It isn't that our clientele need to worry about inhaling secondhand smoke, but my concern is for the living who should do nothing in the morgue that requires them to have hand-to-mouth contact.

Hand-to-mouth odd-job existence, demonstrations, pot, dirty pad, unbathed girls, the works.