Meaning
To sustain or carry a person through a short-term shortage or difficulty - most often of money or food - until an expected supply arrives or conditions improve. It always names a stopgap, not a cure: a small loan, a snack or a temporary job tides you over until payday, dinner or the next contract. Do not conflate with this site's separate entries turn the tide and stem the tide, which are about trends. Nearly always transitive, with a person or group as object. The common misspelling tie someone over is an eggcorn. The floating-until-help gloss overstates the record. Regional use: British and American English, all registers.
Origin
Built on the verb tide in its nautical sense, to cause to float with or as if with the tide: the OED's factsheet for the verb gives 1593 (Barnabe Barnes), verified directly, and Merriam-Webster likewise dates the verb to 1593. The earliest known description of the literal phrase is Captain John Smith's A Sea Grammar (1627): 'To Tide ouer to a place, is to goe ouer with the Tide of ebbe or flood, and stop the contrary by anchoring' - a vessel making headway by riding the tide and anchoring when it turned against her, verified on the fetched Phrase Finder page. The figurative sense is first recorded in 1821, in the Earl of Dudley's Letters to the Bishop of Llandaff: 'I wish we may be able to tide over this difficulty.' Merriam-Webster also dates tide over to 1821, and Ammer calls it early 1800s, alluding to the way the tide carries something. The popular nautical origin is genuine and supported by the record - but the attested 1627 sense is a ship working over a passage on favourable tides, not the oft-repeated embellishment about floating on the tide until help arrives, which appears in no dictionary.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- tide one over
- tide someone over
- tided over
Usage Examples
- A small loan from her brother tided her over until her first paycheck arrived.
- Keep some crackers in your desk drawer to tide you over until lunch.
- The emergency fund was just enough to tide the family over the winter.