phrasal verb

• Manage with difficulty to live or accomplish something.

  ‘he had just enough money to get by’

  More example sentences

  • ‘I'd cleaned the house thoroughly early in the day and Dolly and I had managed to get by with only minimal mess.’
  • ‘He's somehow managed to get by without being eliminated, but his number looks likely to be up very soon.’
  • ‘They leave these matters to others and get by somehow, often living from hand to mouth, day to day.’
  • ‘How on earth do we get by, living, as we do, amid the exhausted projects of modernity?’
  • ‘As a twentysomething student living at home in Dublin, he could get by on little money.’
  • ‘Well, people got by through various technical loopholes.’
  • ‘While some have taken Korean classes and have done quite well, others have plodded along getting by with a litany of stock phrases and vocabulary.’
  • ‘When he couldn't cope, he simply locked his house and came here with his wife and four daughters hoping to make some money instead of just getting by.’
  • ‘He is grateful for the company but it will be difficult to get by without his family.’
  • ‘We knew it would be a difficult season, and basically we did enough to get by.’

  Synonyms

  manage, cope, survive, exist, subsist, muddle along, muddle through, scrape along, scrape by, scrape through, make ends meet, get on, get along, make do, barely have enough to live on, scarcely have enough to live on, keep the wolf from the door, keep one's head above water, scrimp, scrape a living

  View synonyms