MEANING
To change the rules or success criteria while someone is trying to meet them, making success harder.
Use it for
criticizing shifting requirements; showing an unfair change to a target; describing a standard changed after progress; distinguishing revised criteria from a stable assessmentNames a shifting success criterion that unfairly frustrates someone already trying to meet it. Writing functions: Unfair standards.
Words that belong together
- keep moving the goalposts
- accuse someone of moving the goalposts
On the page
Every time the team met the target, management moved the goalposts.
Demanding a new kind of evidence only after the original test succeeds risks moving the goalposts.
Word forms
- Base
- move the goalposts
Usage notes
Verbal idiom: move/moves/moved/moving the goalposts. Goalposts remains plural. Register: informal. Commonness: common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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