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Glite Dictionary
📢 To spread 🔄 To turn in circle 🚧 To avoid rules 🫱 To be enough ↩️ To avoid directly
to go around

to go around

63 2.4
Be enough for everyone to have a share
  • phrasal verb
  • /ɡoʊ əˈraʊnd/
translation icon : alcanzar
  • There's enough cake to go around at the party, so everyone can have a slice.
  • enough to go around
  • blame to go around

There's so much malevolence to go around.

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Examples

  • One of the things we know about the American legal system is there are not enough lawyers to go around to poor people in the US.

    Stanford

  • WOMAN 2: There's not gonna be any more food to go around.

    Chevalier (2023)

  • The more people we allow in, the less water we have to go around.

    Fiction book (2001)

  • "It's a big country, and there are not enough troops to go around."

    Academic text (2001)

  • As the economy grows, there is more to go around for everyone.

    Academic text (1993)

  • There is plenty of blame to go around for this lack of preparation.

    Academic text (1999)

  • There aren't enough resources or energy to go around.

    Roman Candle (2021)

  • There's plenty of food to go around.

    Road Trip (2000)

  • The droughts meant less feed to go around, and farmers had to take drastic measures.

    Blog text (12)

  • Even in astronomer-rich Tucson, it's tougher each year to find enough astronomers to go around.

    Academic text (2000)

Antonyms

scarce
103 4.8

Not enough of something for people who need it

insufficient
86 3.6

Not enough in amount or quality to meet a need

How Sufficient

to go around
63 2.4
to fall short
64 3.9

Surface Forms

go around infinitive
went around past
gone around past participle
going around present participle
goes around third person singular

Morphology

go + around

The meaning 'to circulate among people' is directly and compositionally derived from 'go' (to move) combined with 'around' (around/about/among), yielding the motion sense of moving through a group. This motion-to-distribution mapping is common cross-linguistically and follows standard English particle-verb patterns, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can readily infer the meaning.

Etymology

Go around comes from passing food or goods around a table so each person can have some. That image explains why it means 'to be enough for everyone'.