Word.ws English Dictionary

by left

by left adjective: done without abiding by proper rules and procedures, as it may be more convenient to ignore them entirely, bend the rules or use a workaround.

Adjective

by left (comparative more by left, superlative most by left)

  1. (Singapore, Singlish, idiomatic, slang) Done without abiding by proper rules and procedures, as it may be more convenient to ignore them entirely, bend the rules or use a workaround.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (Singapore, Singlish, humorous, idiomatic, often, slang) Used to refute a previous statement of by right by demonstrating that something is, in practice, done in an unofficial manner, without much regard for proper procedures and protocols.
    • By right, we’re supposed to lock the room every night. By left, we only do it every Friday since no-one bothers to check.

Forms of by left

comparativemore by left
superlativemost by left

Origin of by left

By analogy with by right.

Questions about by left

What does by left mean?
By left means done without abiding by proper rules and procedures, as it may be more convenient to ignore them entirely, bend the rules or use a workaround.
What part of speech is by left?
By left can be an adjective or a prepositional phrase.

Words near by left in the dictionary

  1. by jings
  2. by Jove
  3. by juckies
  4. by Jupiter
  5. by leaps and starts
  6. by left
  7. by little and little
  8. by long chalks
  9. by means of
  10. by mistake
  11. by my faith

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by left (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “by left.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/by_left. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.