Word.ws English Dictionary

scraping by

scraping by is the present participle and gerund of scrape by.

Meaning of scrape by

Verb

scrape by (third-person singular simple present scrapes by, present participle scraping by, simple past and past participle scraped by)

  1. (intransitive) To only afford the essentials; to barely sustain oneself.
    • Everyone in her family had to get a second job just so they could scrape by.
    Synonyms:
    scratch by

Questions about scraping by

What is scraping by the present participle and gerund of?
Scraping by is the present participle and gerund of scrape by.

Words near scraping by in the dictionary

  1. scrapin'
  2. scraping
  3. scraping along
  4. scraping and bowing
  5. scraping at the bottom of the barrel
  6. scraping by
  7. scraping down
  8. scraping off
  9. scraping someone off the ceiling
  10. scraping the barrel
  11. scraping the bottom of the barrel

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scraping by (page history and authors); scrape by (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: “scraping by.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scraping_by. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.