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Live on borrowed time

Idiomatic Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

To continue living or existing beyond what was expected or allotted; to exist in a precarious state that cannot last.

Detailed Definition
This sobering idiom frames existence as a loan—time is not truly one's own but borrowed, to be returned at any moment. In poetry, it appears in works about illness, age, ecological crisis, and political precarity, capturing the experience of continuing beyond the expected end. Poets invoke it to explore gratitude, urgency, and the heightened quality of perception that accompanies the knowledge of finite time. It suits elegy, meditation, and apocalyptic verse, wherever the speaker is acutely aware that the present moment is unearned extension. The phrase also raises questions about indebtedness—to whom is time borrowed, and how should the borrowed life be spent? What obligations attach to the gift of time that was not strictly one's own?
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about terminal illness might use live on borrowed time to describe the heightened quality of perception that accompanies the knowledge that time is no longer one's own — each day now acknowledged as an unearned extension; In an ecological poem about a species nearing extinction, to live on borrowed time is the description of the remaining individuals — their continued existence a loan against a debt that will inevitably come due; A poem about a political regime whose end is clearly coming but has not yet arrived might describe it as living on borrowed time — the anachronism of its continued existence making every day of its continuation a kind of theft from the future that is waiting; In a confessional poem about survival — of cancer, of accident, of a near-death experience — live on borrowed time describes the speaker's altered relationship with ordinary time after the return from what should have been the end; A poem about aging might use the phrase to describe the elder's experience of time as gift rather than entitlement — the morning that arrives as surprise, the day as grace, the whole remaining life as borrowed and therefore to be spent with the care one gives to what belongs to another; The phrase raises the question of indebtedness — to whom is the borrowed time owed, and what constitutes a worthy way to spend it — that suits philosophical verse about the ethics of survival
Additional Notes
This idiom implies survival beyond expectation, often under threat. In poetry, it suits illness, old age, endangered love, failing institutions, wartime reprieve, or ecological fragility. “Borrowed” suggests debt: the extra time is not owned, only temporarily granted. Related images include loans, clocks, reprieves, candles, hospital light, and gratitude shadowed by fear.
Also Known As
On borrowed time Living on time borrowed
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