Word.ws English Dictionary

in the swim

in the swim prepositional phrase: actively participating in the flow of events; very involved.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Actively participating in the flow of events; very involved.
    • He had very little money, but he was lucky at cards, made many acquaintances, took part in all entertainments, in a word, he was in the swim.1894, Ivan Turgenev, chapter 8, in Constance Garnett, transl., A House of Gentlefolk, published 1859
    • These punctual jaunts, very sensibly practised as a purge against dullness, together with the stir and hubbub of a garrison town in which his walled garden stood isolated, as it were, all day long, amid marchings, countermarchings, bugle-calls, and the rumble of wagons filled with material of war...1903, Arthur Quiller-Couch, chapter 12, in The Mayor of Troy

Questions about in the swim

What does in the swim mean?
In the swim means actively participating in the flow of events; very involved.
What part of speech is in the swim?
In the swim is a prepositional phrase.

Words near in the swim in the dictionary

  1. in the stars
  2. in the stead of
  3. in the stratosphere
  4. in the straw
  5. in the streets
  6. in the swim
  7. in the swim of things
  8. in the tank
  9. in the teeth of
  10. in the thick of
  11. in the thick of it

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: in the swim (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-in the swim.ogg.

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