old fashioned To cope or manage to do something without all the resources that one would ideally like to have. Often followed by "with" or "without," depending on the context of the sentence. We don't have all the spices we need for this recipe, but we can make shift with what we have. Since I forgot to pick up milk on the way home, I guess we're just going to have to make shift without it. When I was growing up, we didn't have a lot of money, but we made shift.