tide over

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

tide over (third-person singular simple present tides over, present participle tiding over, simple past and past participle tided over)

1. (transitive, idiomatic) To support or sustain (someone), especially financially, for a limited period.

   Could you lend me ten pounds to tide me over till payday?

   Would a small snack tide you over until dinner?

   • 1901, Henry James, The Papers:

     Each evening, it was true, when the flare of Fleet Street would have begun really to smoke, she had, in resistance to old habit, a little to hold herself; but for three successive days she tided over that crisis.

2. (transitive, obsolete outside India) To endure; weather.
   • 1895, Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan: or The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire , 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: J B Lippincott Company, published 1896, →OCLC, page 75:

     I had a certain grim pleasure in reading letters from two or three literary men, asking for work ‘as secretary or companion,’ or failing that, for the loan of a little cash to ‘tide over present difficulties.’

   • 1952 December, R. C. Riley, “By Rail to Kemp Town”, in Railway Magazine, page 832:

     In responding, J. P. Knight, the Traffic Manager, emphasised the company's desire to meet the wants of Brighton in every way and to develop traffic, while the question of a reduction in fares would be considered as soon as they had tided over their most pressing difficulties.

   • 2001, Swami Parmeshwaranand, Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Puranas:

     I will therefore suggest a way to tide over this difficulty.

• hold over
• tide through
• carry through

• tideover (adj)

• overedit