to keep afloat
1
4.1
- phrasal verb
:
mantenerse a flote
- The North Korean economy was already unsustainable in the 1970s and 1980s and has been kept afloat largely thanks to aid grants, first from the Soviet Union and then from China and South Korea.
- struggling to keep afloat
Examples
-
In fact, most people (and businesses) have to be able to work within a budget if they intend to keep afloat.
Blog text (19) -
Well, Bettman is fighting for financial concessions to keep afloat teams such as Phoenix and Columbus.
Blog text (25) -
The reality is that families must find ways to keep afloat.
Blog text (24) -
Instead, they are kept afloat by governmental credits that are given with negative real interest rates.
Academic text (1993) -
Taxi drivers face mounting surcharges and fees, and barely keep afloat.
Blog text (23) -
The government felt compelled to keep afloat industries whose markets in arms sales and transactions with the Soviet Union were lost in 1991, and the cost proved enormous.
Academic text (1991) -
The banks are being kept afloat with the interest being paid on the recapitalization bonds they received from the government in exchange for the loans that went into default in the 1997-98 crisis.
Academic text (2004) -
The international donor community's habit of keeping afloat predatory and other troubled states (in some cases covering up to half of their recurrent government expenditures) must end.
Academic text (2008) -
Many small businesses struggle to keep afloat during economic downturns.
-
The nonprofit organization held charity events to keep afloat after losing significant funding.
Synonyms
16
4.1
Keep operating when money is low
15
5.3
To keep someone or something floating and give them hope
8
4.7
To avoid serious money problems during hard times
1
5.1
To keep enough money to pay bills and not owe money
To have enough money to keep going and avoid failure
Make sure accounts have no debt or extra money
To manage to survive when you have money problems
Keep someone or something floating on water
Antonyms
How Afloat
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly derived from combining 'keep' (maintain/continue) with 'afloat' (literally floating), yielding the idea of maintaining a non-sinking/solvent state. The buoyancy → financial solvency metaphor is common cross-linguistically and follows a straightforward compositional pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both words can reasonably infer the intended sense.
Etymology
Keep afloat comes from the image of holding a small boat above the water so it does not sink. To keep a boat afloat is to stop it from going under, so to keep afloat with money means to 'avoid money problems'.