Word.ws English Dictionary

by the time

by the time conjunction: when (some future event has come to pass).

Conjunction

by the time

  1. When (some future event has come to pass).
    • I'll be an old man by the time you finish!
    • It was ready by the time he arrived.

Examples of by the time in a sentence

  • It had been just finished by the time of his arrival.
  • By the time we reached the house we were thanking our stars she had come.1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter V, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company...
  • By the time I get to Phoenix she'll be rising.1965, Jimmy Webb, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”:

Questions about by the time

What does by the time mean?
By the time means when (some future event has come to pass).
How do you use by the time in a sentence?
It had been just finished by the time of his arrival.
What part of speech is by the time?
By the time is a conjunction.

Words near by the time in the dictionary

  1. by the score
  2. by the skin of one's teeth
  3. by the sly
  4. by the sound of it
  5. by the strong hand
  6. by the time
  7. by the ton
  8. by the way
  9. by the way of
  10. by their fruits you will know them
  11. by thunder

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by the time (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.

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