rely on/upon

phrasal verb

relied on/upon; relying on/upon; relies on/upon

1

: to need (someone or something) for support, help, etc. : to depend on (someone or something)

My mother relied on me for financial support.

They rely on a well for all their water.

2

: to trust or believe (someone or something)

She's someone you can rely on.

I relied heavily upon your advice.

You could always rely on him to disagree.

3

: to expect (something) with confidence : to be certain that (something) will happen or exist

The economy may improve next year, but it's not something you can rely on.

Examples of rely on/upon in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Related Stories To achieve this rate and scale of production, ultra-fast fashion business models rely on extractive and polluting modes of over-production. —Áine Clarke, Sourcing Journal, 18 Dec. 2024

Modern humans rely on plastic in their everyday lives. —Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 18 Dec. 2024

To form their answers, these LLMs rely on pretraining that metaphorically entails putting trillions of word fragments from existing texts, such as books and websites, into a large blender and coarsely mixing them. —Jonathan L. Zittrain, The Atlantic, 17 Dec. 2024

Modern defense systems increasingly rely on adversarial training, where AI systems autonomously develop attack and defense strategies without human intervention. —Songyee Yoon, Forbes, 17 Dec. 2024