dip into

British  

verb

1. to draw (upon)

   he dipped into his savings

2. to read (passages) at random or cursorily in (a book, newspaper, etc)

---

dip into Idioms  

1. Investigate superficially, as in He began to dip into Chaucer , or She's just dipping into psychology . This expression alludes to plunging briefly into a liquid. [Late 1600s]

2. Withdraw something in small amounts, usually money, as in I'll have to dip into my savings . This usage employs dip into in the sense of plunging one's hand or a ladle into a pot, water, or the like for the purpose of taking something out. [Early 1800s]

---

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

dip into

Milk production is down because the cows are stressed and grass isn’t growing fast enough for them to feed, forcing farmers to dip into winter feed.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 31, 2026

My wife and I are both retired’: Do we dip into our $2.3 million fund to pay off our $300,000 mortgage at 2.9%?

From MarketWatch ● Aug. 18, 2026

“The intensity of those games, the environments that you have to dip into and get results, you find out a lot about the players and find out a lot about the team,” he said.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 9, 2026

"It makes sense that Amazon’s first dip into 007 mythology should be with a game," games and culture journalist Keith Stuart of British paper The Guardian argued in a newsletter this month.

From Barron's ● May 26, 2026

Bobby, who was becoming Collins’s pupil, had been studying past and present chess games for years and had begun to dip into Collins’s library of hundreds of books and periodicals.

From "Endgame" by Frank Brady