What is the meaning of the phrase “low hanging fruit”?

In order to help you understand meaning of the phrase “low hanging fruit”, just picture an image of a tree with fruit. The “low hanging” fruit is the fruit that is lowest on the tree – meaning that the fruit is easily reached by a person who is looking to grab some of the fruit. When the phrase “low hanging fruit” is used, the fruit is equivalent to rewards, and the “low hanging” means that those rewards are relatively easy to acquire when compared to the “fruit” that is higher up on the tree. So, the phrase “low hanging fruit” is used to mean the rewards that are easily acquired, for which you don’t have to work too hard to get but you still get just as much benefit from as the things that you would have had to work harder for – like the fruits that are higher up on the tree, for which you would have had to climb up higher to retrieve. The simplest definition is that “low hanging fruit” means something that is easy to do.

Low hanging fruit synonyms

Some synonyms for the phrase “low hanging fruit” that we can think of are: “quick wins”, “no-brainers”, “easy rewards”, “easily accomplished work”, and “high return, low risk item”.

Example of Low hanging fruit in a sentence

Here’s an example of how to use the phrase “low hanging fruit” in an actual sentence:

"The first thing that the new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, 
did as CEO was redesign the Yahoo Mail user interface.  
This was a low hanging fruit, since it was pretty obvious 
what needed to be changed and doing it was fairly simple."

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