to sweat it out
8
7.3
- phrasal verb
- /swɛt ɪt aʊt/
- Informal
:
aguantar
- After a difficult week at work, I needed to sweat it out to clear my mind and relieve my tension.
- just sweat it out
- sweat it out a little longer
- want to sweat it out
And so I had to just sweat it out on stage.
- And so I had to just sweat it out on stage.
- And while his cousin is sweating it out, Benji tends to walk around at times like the world is his oyster.
- Yeah, I am more like the Peggy Olson sweating it out.
- Go and have a shower, try and sweat it out and like because you can't fathom not having that If you don't have your next line, the world's going to end.
Examples
-
We'll just have to sweat it out.
-
He can sweat it out.
-
And so I had to just sweat it out on stage.
-
Just leave her to sweat it out.
-
I just got to sweat it out.
-
Let him sweat it out.
-
We wanted him to sweat it out for a while.
Academic text (1994) -
Brandy will sweat it out.
-
There's no honor, no glory in that, so you sit down and sweat it out.
-
She looked down at the trail that edged Town Lake and the lunch-hour joggers—tiny figures sweating it out in the midday sun so many stories below.
Fiction book (1995)
Synonyms
1
7.7
To keep going through a hard time by being brave
Antonyms
How Uncomfortable
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal constituents 'sweat' (to perspire) and 'out' (to completion/through) provide a plausible clue that the phrase involves enduring or working through something, so a learner could infer a sense of prolonged effort or discomfort. However, the addition of 'it' and the idiomatic extension to meaning 'endure a period of anxiety/ hardship' (or the specialized sense 'exercise intensely to relieve stress') is partly metaphorical and not fully predictable, making the expression only partly transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
The phrasal verb sweat it out comes from the picture of a person who sweats while waiting through a hard, anxious time or who works out until the sweat comes out. So, it means 'to wait through something uncomfortable' or 'to exercise hard to relieve stress'.