Word.ws English Dictionary

get by

get by verb: to subsist; to succeed, survive, or manage, at least at a minimal level.

Verb

get by (third-person singular simple present gets by, present participle getting by, simple past got by, past participle (UK) got by or (US) gotten by)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To subsist; to succeed, survive, or manage, at least at a minimal level.
    • Do you think they can get by on only one salary?
    • Good girls do bad things sometimes / But we get by with it / Good girls do bad things sometimes / But we get by with it2013, Tim Myers, Melissa Sheppard, “Bad Things”, in Dear You, performed by Meiko

get by meaning in Malayalam and Vietnamese

get by in Malayalam

cope, manage, survive
കഴിഞ്ഞുകൂടുക, കഴിഞ്ഞുപോകുക, സാഹചര്യം വേണ്ടവിധത്തിൽ കെെകാര്യം ചെയ്യുക, ഫലപ്രദമായി കെൊര്യം ചെയ്യുക, വിജയപ്രദമായി കൊണ്ടുനടക്കുക, നേരിടുക

get by in Vietnamese

subsist
xoay xở sống

Synonyms of get by

Forms of get by

third-person singular presentgets by
present participlegetting by
pastgot by
past participle UKgot by
past participle USgotten by

Questions about get by

What does get by mean?
Get by means to subsist; to succeed, survive, or manage, at least at a minimal level.
What is get by in Malayalam?
Get by in Malayalam is കഴിഞ്ഞുകൂടുക, കഴിഞ്ഞുപോകുക, സാഹചര്യം വേണ്ടവിധത്തിൽ കെെകാര്യം ചെയ്യുക. See Get by meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is get by?
Get by is a verb.
What is the past tense of get by?
The past tense of get by is got by.

Words near get by in the dictionary

  1. get blood from a stone
  2. get blood from a turnip
  3. get blood out of a stone
  4. get blood out of a turnip
  5. get busy
  6. get by
  7. get by the balls
  8. get by with
  9. get changed
  10. get cold feet
  11. get cracking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: get by (page history and authors); get by (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-get by.ogg.

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