verb

• 1Make an amount or supply of something last longer by using or consuming it frugally.

  ‘the remains of yesterday's stew could be eked out to make another meal’

  More example sentences

  • ‘She said: ‘We shared a can of fruit salad and a can of Coke - we didn't have many treats so we eked them out.’
  • ‘Except when I tell the story it takes me about ten minutes to eke it out.’
  • ‘Sounds great, but this technology is not designed to replace oil, merely to eke it out.’
  • ‘There is no money to pay the bills and Mae tops up a half-empty bottle of milk to eke it out.’
  • ‘This will be how your final hours will be eked out.’
  • ‘In other words, he ekes the maximum out of his action.’
  • ‘As I write page after page of this I realize that I could eke a book out of this review.’
  • ‘Deposit your redundancy cheque in a Best Buy high-interest easy-access savings account, and try to eke it out for as long as you can.’

  Synonyms

  economize on, skimp on, be economical with, be more economical with, make economies with, scrimp and scrape, save

  augment, add to, increase, supplement

  1. 1.1Manage to make a living with difficulty.
     ‘many traders barely eked out a living’
     More example sentences

     • ‘The levels of poverty hit you as soon as you walk out of the airport and see people trying to eke a living out of the very earth they walk on.’
     • ‘He strongly admires him because he knows how tough it is to eke a living out of one of Australia's last frontiers.’
     • ‘Some of these mines have killed and wounded their military opponents, but many of the victims are women and children who have remained in the area attempting to eke a living out of the now lethal farm land.’
     • ‘Even she, the governor's daughter, was eking it out on an annual salary roughly equivalent to that of a 7-11 night manager - no coddling, no hand-outs.’
     Synonyms

     scrape, scratch, scrimp

adverb