How to Use scrape by in a Sentence
scrape by
phrasal verb-
Alexander quit her job and spent the next two years of the pandemic scraping by.
—Federica Cocco, Washington Post, 3 July 2023
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Living with just her three youngest now, the mother must put them all to work in order to just scrape by.
—Dennis Harvey, Variety, 8 Dec. 2023
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We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us just continue to scrape by.
—Chris Isidore, CNN, 12 Sep. 2023
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Airbnb did not confirm the numbers in the data scraped by Inside Airbnb.
—Amanda Hoover, WIRED, 9 Oct. 2023
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The bottom line is that the Texans were scraping by mediocre opponents while the Ravens were smashing some of the league’s best teams.
—Childs Walker, Baltimore Sun, 8 Jan. 2024
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Those rules produced top-heavy payrolls that see some players get paid well while others scrape by.
—Kevin Baxter, Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2023
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Musicians, authors, and visual artists can no longer scrape by with talent, hard work, and good looks alone.
—Celia Ford, Vox, 5 June 2024
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Shopkeepers and trinket vendors scraping by on $6 a day are among the few on the streets from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., when scorching heat makes Hodeida feel like a ghost town.
—Kareem Fahim, Washington Post, 12 Oct. 2023
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Caught in the middle, though, are millions of Americans who are barely scraping by.
—Terry Savage, Chicago Tribune, 14 Aug. 2023
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And plenty of publishers have now taken steps to prevent their websites from being freely scraped by web crawlers.
—Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 2 Jan. 2024
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Nearly two out of every three adults in the U.S. are just scraping by, due to inflationary pressures, according to a new study.
—Bychris Morris, Fortune, 31 Aug. 2023
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Researchers would have to scrape by on grants from private entities and limited state funding.
—Owen Tucker-Smith, Anchorage Daily News, 5 Aug. 2023
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On Wednesday, the storm scraped by Jamaica’s southern coast, producing flooding rains and wind gusts over 80 mph that destroyed homes and toppled trees and power lines.
—Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, 5 July 2024
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Armstrong helped put the answer in context for everyone: Many patients have been homeless, scraping by with little to eat.
—Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times, 13 Dec. 2023
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Artists who feel their work was scraped by AI without credit or compensation are seeking recourse.
—Angela Watercutter, WIRED, 30 June 2023
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Many family child-care providers currently earn less than minimum wage and are barely scraping by, Arias said.
—Jenny Gold, Los Angeles Times, 7 July 2023
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But as many South Africans continue to scrape by, voters have become disenchanted.
—John Eligon Prentice Onayemi Anna Diamond Devin Murphy, New York Times, 21 May 2024
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California's Proposition 1 scraped by with barely more than 50% of the vote in a heavily Democratic state.
—USA TODAY, 29 Mar. 2024
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In areas like western Guatemala, where coconut, corn and banana plantations stretch along the highway, many people scrape by at a barely subsistence level.
—Soudi Jiménez, Los Angeles Times, 23 June 2023
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Given rising rents and a 14% jump in food prices in Dallas-Fort Worth — the second highest nationwide after Detroit — working people and seniors who had been scraping by can no longer make ends meet.
—Terry Wagner, Dallas News, 29 June 2023
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As a graduate of Berklee with her own memories of scraping by as a poor music student in Boston, Rachel Jordan says her investment feels personal.
—Melanie Stetson Freeman, The Christian Science Monitor, 14 Sep. 2023
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The family scraped by on their payment plans, retiring the medical debt within a year, with help from Crivilare's side job selling resources for teachers online.
—Noam Levey, NPR, 9 May 2024
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Read full article Some of the more famous folks walking the picket lines can afford to stay out of work for months, but for the lesser lights beside them — actors and writers who barely scrape by — AI is already an immediate existential threat.
—BostonGlobe.com, 22 July 2023
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Nor is life much easier for the next generation: Gaz’s teenage daughter, Destiny (Talitha Wing), is barely scraping by in class and struggling with an unstable home situation at her mom’s.
—Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 June 2023
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But statistics on jobs filled don’t tell the whole story of people barely scraping by in multiple jobs, underemployed after a career derailment or pushed into retirement against their will.
—Karla L. Miller, Washington Post, 8 Feb. 2024
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Apple instead uses both licensed materials and publicly available online data that are scraped by the company’s Applebot web crawler.
—Umar Shakir, The Verge, 13 June 2024
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In India, where outright unemployment hardly exists, many similarly scrape by.
—Hari Kumar Atul Loke, New York Times, 28 June 2023
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'scrape by.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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