meeting of (the) minds

A situation in which two or more people reach an understanding or agreement. There was a meeting of the minds between finance industry leaders and law enforcement in order to help curb financial fraud. After debating for hours, we finally came to a meeting of minds and decided on a name for our band.

See also: meeting, mind, of

meeting of the minds

the establishment of agreement; complete agreement. After a lot of discussion we finally reached a meeting of the minds. We struggled to bring about a meeting of the minds on the issues.

See also: meeting, mind, of

meeting of the minds

Agreement, concord, as in The teachers and the headmaster had a meeting of the minds regarding smoking in school. This expression uses meet in the sense of "arrive at mutual agreement," as clergyman Edward B. Pusey did in a letter of 1851: "Devout minds, of every school ... meet at least in this."

See also: meeting, mind, of

The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 2003, 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

a meeting of minds

an understanding or agreement between people.

See also: meeting, mind, of

Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary © Farlex 2017

a meeting of ˈminds

people thinking in the same way about something; a special understanding between people: I think there will be a meeting of minds on this subject. ♢ The discussions were a failure. There was no meeting of minds between the two parties.

See also: meeting, mind, of

meeting of the minds

Agreement; concord.

See also: meeting, mind, of

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

meeting of the minds, a

A mutual agreement or understanding. The term comes from contract law, where it describes the intentions of the parties to a contract. The legal sense dates from the mid-1800s. Jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes refuted the idea that such an agreement is basic to a contract, writing in 1897 in the Harvard Law Review that a meeting of the minds was really a fiction. Nevertheless, the term has been adopted for various kinds of agreement. For example, a headline in an online journal, Technorati, for an article by Scott Hewitt about a meeting between President Obama and Republican senate minority leader Mitch McConnell read, “Is an Obama-McConnell Meeting of the Minds an Omen for November?” (August 6, 2010).