spill into

spill into (something or some place)

1. Of a liquid, to flow out of a container or over some barrier and into something or some place else. Don't fill the casserole dish too high, or some will spill into the oven while it's cooking. The floodwaters rose above the embankment and spilled into the adjacent fields.
2. To go beyond the borders or parameters of something and into something else, especially due to growing too large in size, amount, or scope. The protests outside the central bank began growing so large that they eventually spilled into the entire financial district. So many people turned up to the bar for Mary's birthday that we all started spilling into the streets.
See also: spill
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

spill (out) into something

 and spill (over) into something
to be so great in number or volume as to expand into another area. The crowd spilled out into the street. The well-wishers spilled over into the neighbor's yard.
See also: spill
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • spill into (something or some place)
  • spill out into (something or some place)
  • spill over into (something or some place)
  • brim
  • brim over
  • bounce out
  • bubble over
  • serve (something) in (something or some place)
  • serve in
  • element
References in periodicals archive
TEHRAN (FNA)- Niger Delta's fishermen are no strangers to seeing oil spill into their waters from leaky pipelines, but even they were shocked by the scale of the slick stretching for miles from a Shell facility across the swamps and into the ocean.
American Shell's Pipeline Leaking Thousands of Barrels into Niger Delta
Haddad added that Tuesday's accident resulted from a technical error by one of the contractor's workers as he was emptying an oil tank's cleaning water, causing oil to spill into the sea.
National Cement Company promptly cleans up oil spill
During coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Nicholas Pozzi, a former Saudi Aramco employee, maintained a 1993 accident caused millions of liters of crude oil to spill into the Arabian Gulf and that he was in the team that developed a plan to remove the crude using Saudi-owned supertankers.
Aramco refutes 'secret' spill claims