work-life balance
balance
verb
uk /ˈbæləns/us
[ T ] ACCOUNTING
to arrange a system of accounts so that the amount of money spent is no more than the amount received:
The Conservatives initially balanced the books by selling assets and cutting health and education spending.
[ I ] ACCOUNTING, BANKING
if an account balances, the amounts of money on the credit and debit sides are equal:
He had made some kind of computation error and the account didn't balance.
[ T ]
to spend only as much money as you have received, or planned to spend:
The President is unlikely to balance the budget in this term of office, but he does hope to lower the deficit.
[ I or T ](alsobalance (sth) out)
to be equal in amount or value, or to make things equal in amount or value:
They hoped that this month's good sales would balance out the poor sales in the previous month.
[ T ]
to give two or more things equal amounts of importance, time, or money so that a situation is successful:
I struggle to balance work and family commitments.
 a balancing act
a situation in which a person tries to give equal amounts of importance to two or more things so that a situation is successful:
Outsourcing decisions are essentially a balancing act between the benefits of markets, lower production costs, and higher transaction costs.

Examples of balance

balance
Our aim was to select children who had as balanced an exposure as possible to both languages.
Each task contained two blocks of 36 items, the sequence of blocks was balanced over participants.
An initial semantic congruency check was performed for each of the possible meanings within each stimulus to make sure they were balanced on that dimension.
The person who has achieved full virtue has passions that are rightfully balanced.
The model calibration balanced market and non-market effects in setting baseline conditions.
In the following, steady state is used equivalently to balanced growth path.
Right lung: overflow, with balancing ofthe base to apex flow.
More often than not, however, the distribution of text between the prima parte and seconda parte is not balanced.
A choice between rough equals is balanced, but not in the fine way that a choice between exact equals is.
The motivation for adding such complexity to the already complex situation of balancing selection in subdivided populations is two-fold.
A simple genealogical structure of strongly balanced allelic lines and trans-species evolution of polymorphism.
The effects of local selection, balanced polymorphism and background selection on equilibrium patterns of genetic diversity in subdivided populations.
Here the pressure transport and convection are vanishingly small and the gain of energy by production is balanced by diffusion and dissipation.
Equations (2.7b, c) represent the shear and normal-stress balances.
The dose is managed by a trained operator, knowledgeable in matters of radiation safety, who makes a judgement balancing risk against expected clinical benefit.
See all examples of balance
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withbalance

balance

These are words often used in combination with balance.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

affect balance
The groups understood that some medications may cause dizziness or affect balance.
appropriate balance
The solidification of such a nationalist elite required the maintenance of an appropriatebalance among the social orders.
balance of payment
Globalization enables the fast movement of money between countries, resulting in frequent balance ofpayment crises and unstable domestic economic performance.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
See all collocations with balance