by

/baɪ/6 verbs

Movement past something, without stopping or with nothing to spare.

BY carries the sense of going past — and because passing is brief, most BY verbs are about short visits: drop by, stop by, come by, swing by.

Its other sense is scraping through with the minimum: get by on a small salary. And in run by, you move an idea past someone so they can look at it.

What it does to the sound

BY begins with /b/, a consonant, so the verb's final stop stays unreleased and the two fuse: drop by has no puff of air after the P. The vowel is the full /aɪ/ of buy — BY is stressed, unlike the reduced particles TO and FOR.

What BY means

A brief visit

You stop somewhere on your way to somewhere else.

drop bystop bycome byswing by

Passing without stopping

Something moves past — often time, often unnoticed.

pass by go bywalk by

Barely managing

You survive with just enough and nothing spare.

get byscrape by

Every verb that takes BY

The complete list — 6 of them. The section above groups the common ones by what BY is doing.

The particle BY — what it does to a verb