English · Word pair Attested

sink or swim

In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

Fail or succeed.

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

thất bại hoặc thành công

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

The Highways Department will sink or swim on the basis of everyone pulling together.’

‘ He threw him in there newly dead, and Benedetta with him living, to sink or swim together.

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed on Wikipedia “Irreversible binomial” (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-29). Figurative class: Metaphor (PIE-English corpus, CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-31).

Common questions

What does “sink or swim” mean?

Fail or succeed.

Is “sink or swim” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.

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