to fight for one's life
23
6.1
- idiom
- Informal
:
luchar por su vida
- She's fighting for her life, Claussen.
- people fighting for their lives
- man fighting for his life
- still fighting for his life
Examples
-
Cortez is fighting for his life.
-
After all, a man is fighting for his life.
Fiction book (2001) -
Take him off of everything and let our son fight for his life.
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Two men fighting for their lives.
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You were given the opportunity to fight for your life, and you won.
Blog text (14) -
While some have been released, others are still fighting for their lives in hospitals.
Blog text (28) -
Tom is fighting for his life and you think it'll be okay?
-
Eustace had courage; he was fighting for his life; he held on.
Fiction book (1998) -
Officers were called to the scene at approximately 3:30 Monday morning, alerted by a 911 call from Susie Diehl, who was fighting for her life.
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The firefighters worked tirelessly to save the trapped miners, who were fighting for their lives.
Antonyms
How Desperate
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'to make a great effort to survive' is directly and transparently derived from the constituents: 'fight' (to exert effort to resist) + 'for' (on behalf of) + 'one's life' (one's existence). This literal, compositional sense is cross-linguistically common and should be understandable to a B1 learner who knows the individual words.
Etymology
Fight for one's life comes from the clear picture of someone in real danger who must fight with all their strength to hold on to their life, for example fighting in deep water or against a wild animal. So it now means 'to try very hard to survive'.