up against it
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
Facing a difficult or challenging situation
Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt
Đối mặt với một tình huống khó khăn hoặc thách thức
Machine-translated — suggest a fix
Literally: physically close to something
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
With twelve and a half hours left, England were clearly up against it, so when the rain fell on the fourth day they were not too upset.
‘ Linfield were drawn against a better team than the one we defeated — and I know from playing in Cyprus with Shamrock Rovers a few years back that Bangor were up against it, too.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “up against it” mean?
Facing a difficult or challenging situation Literally: physically close to something
Is “up against it” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.