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Eke out   /ik aʊt/   Listen
Eke out

verb
1.
Supplement what is thought to be deficient.  Synonym: fill out.  "Braque eked out his collages with charcoal"
2.
Live from day to day, as with some hardship.
3.
Make by laborious and precarious means.  Synonym: squeeze out.
4.
Obtain with difficulty.  Synonym: squeeze out.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Eke out" Quotes from Famous Books



... in charge of the food and responsible for its safe keeping, wrote in his diary: "The shorter the provisions the more there is to do in the commissariat department, contriving to eke out our slender stores as the weeks pass by. No housewife ever had more to do than we have in making a little go ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... Ep. II, ii, 50.) His father was dead, his property confiscated in the proscription following on the defeat, he had to begin the world again at twenty-four years old. He obtained some sort of clerkship in a public office, and to eke out its slender emoluments he began to write. What were his earliest efforts we cannot certainly say, or whether any of them survive among the poems recognized as his. He tells us that his first literary model was Archilochus (Ep. I, xix, 24), a Greek poet of 700 B.C., believed to have been the ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell

... earliest explorers as sleeker and fatter, but less hardy and active, than the tribes of the mountains and prairies, who live by hunting, or of the upper parts of the river, where fish is scanty, and the inhabitants must eke out their subsistence by digging roots or chasing the deer. Indeed, whenever an Indian of the upper country is too lazy to hunt, yet is fond of good living, he repairs to the falls, to live in ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... classes, and tradesmen, and the best people, and good families, as I supposed nobody in this country ever did,—in earnest. To be sure, I have always been reading of characters who had such opinions, but I thought they were just put into novels to eke out somebody's unhappiness,—to keep the high-born daughter from marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and I could hardly believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in talking in that way. Such things ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... dilating to his mother on the wonders to come. "Private soldiers get just thirteen dollars a month; and if you continue smoking—as I am informed all men do in the army—I expect to have to stint my pin-money expenses to eke out your tobacco bills." ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan


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