come by

British  

verb

1. (intr, preposition) to find or obtain (a thing), esp accidentally

   do you ever come by any old books?

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come by Idioms  

1. Acquire, obtain, as in A good assistant is hard to come by . This usage, dating from about 1600, superseded the earlier sense of acquiring something with considerable effort. A variant is come by honestly , meaning “to obtain in some honorable or logical way.” For example, I'm sure she didn't come by that large bonus honestly or He does have an unusual gait but he came by it honestly; his father's is the same .

2. Stop in, visit, as in Please come by whenever you're in the neighborhood . [Late 1800s]

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Example Sentences

The result is a market in which preferences are private, incentives are misaligned and reliable information is hard to come by.

From The Wall Street Journal

Tickets were hard to come by and reserved for “those building, funding, and researching the technologies that define intelligence.”

From The Wall Street Journal

Aside from the terrible punishment its soldiers are getting on the front lines, the impact on the economy must be severe, although statistics on this are hard to come by.

From BBC

That could come by the end of March, former CIA analyst Helima Croft, now head of global commodities strategy at RBC, wrote in a recent client note.

From Barron's

Fuel—critical for powering generators, heaters and cooking stoves—is hard to come by in Gaza, where it is only allowed to enter in limited amounts.

From The Wall Street Journal

Related Words

• come over
• drop by
• drop in