By

Part of speech: preposition, adverb, noun

Definitions

1. Positioned beside or near something ; carried out through the agency or means of someone or something ; no later than a stated time ; past or away from a place ; to the extent of a specified measure or difference
2. Close to or alongside a place ; through the agency of a person or means ; no later than a given time ; past in motion or out of sight ; to a stated margin of difference
3. Near or next to something ; used to name the doer or method of an action ; before a deadline ; going past or away from view ; as a measure of the extent of a difference

Etymology: The short preposition "by" is one of the oldest words in English, and it has been near us since Old English, when "bī" meant "by, near, around" in much the same spatial sense it carries today. Its ancestry runs back to a Proto-Indo-European root, "*h₁epi," meaning "near" or "at," which also gave the Germanic languages a whole family of cognates: Dutch "bij," German "bei," Afrikaans "by," and West Frisian "by." Because these words all share the same basic idea of nearness, a Dutch or German speaker would recognise the sense of "by" at once. The word's meaning spread outward from that spatial core. Once it denoted physical closeness, it came to express agency ("written by"), means ("by train"), and time limits ("by Friday"). Each of these uses grew from the same notion of being alongside or within reach of something.

Synonyms: beside, near, past, via