not by any stretch of the imagination

stretch | Business English

stretch
verb
uk /stretʃ/us
[ I ]
if money or other resources stretch to something, they are enough to buy or pay for something:
MPs and many within the pensions industry are concerned £400m will not stretch far enough.
stretch to sthOur budget won't stretch to hiring any new workers.
[ T ]
to make money or resources last longer than was originally planned:
City officials are currently struggling with how to stretch limited water supplies.
[ T ]
if something stretches money or other resources, it uses nearly all the money or resources available so that there is very little left:
be stretched to breaking point/the limitThe aviation infrastructure has been stretched to breaking point.
be stretched thinWhen people and funding are stretched thin, companies may find they're not putting enough resources behind the ideas that promise the greatest shareholder returns.
stretch a budget/financesThe takeover will stretch the company's finances.
[ T ] MARKETING
to use a brand that already exists to sell new and different products and services:
The company is trying to stretch its brand to cover anything that can be sold online.
[ T ]
to force someone to use all their intelligence or skills:
My current job isn't really stretching me enough.
stretch
noun
uk /stretʃ/us
  a stretch
used to describe something that you think will be very difficult to achieve, very expensive, etc.:
The price tag on the business may prove to be a stretch.
 20 hours/5 days/6 weeks, etc. at a stretch
if you do something for 20 hours, etc. at a stretch, you do it continuously for that period of time:
Workers on an oil rig often do 12-hour days for 14 days at a stretch.
 work/be at full stretch
to be working as hard as you possibly can:
OPEC members are at full stretch and cannot pump more oil.

Examples of stretch

stretch
In a sense, our relationships with places are similar to those which we have with other people: dialogical, stretched across time, and constantly in motion.
An escalating brutality demonstrated by the 221st against local civilians derived from its increasingly stretched circumstances and the growing threat of the enemy.
The same perception differences apply with commonly used procedures in composition such as transposition, stretching or superposition of sounds.
The subtleties of balancing stretches of time in the alap further extend to the internal structuring of phrases.
The second is that the development of most systems of service provision entails the creation of platforms of activities stretching across sectors and industries.
Quartz-feldspar ribbons and aggregates define a mineral stretching lineation.
The stretching lineation is associated with the formation of early ductile, high-temperature-type folds.
On the other hand, the stretching process does not multiply all frequencies by the same value: the factor is an exponential function of frequency.
Like an aggressive carcinoma, realizability stretches out its tentacles to ever more remote fields: linear logic, complexity theory and rewrite theory have already been infected.
Modern society has witnessed increased longevity and this has raised expectations that the life-span will continue to be stretched.
In this she neither stretches too far in matching fundamentalism for fundamentalism, nor strains to import one location's mores into another's.
One refers to movement and social relations stretched across multiple borders, and the other to a sense of self and group identity that differentiates communities.
There is nothing gradual about a deep-sea migration, and boundaries are intrinsically sharp when speech communities are separated by large stretches of ocean.
Currently, the formation of non-enzymic intermolecular triplexes is limited to purine-rich stretches in the targeted duplex.
The stiff string no longer has a strictly harmonic overtone recipe, with intervals becoming increasingly stretched between higher modes.
See all examples of stretch
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withstretch

stretch

These are words often used in combination with stretch.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

final stretch
Both the availability of information and voter attentiveness is likely to increase during the final stretch of the election, until it reaches its height on election day.
flat stretch
The end of the flatstretch was of course the end of the utterance.
long stretch
Archaeologists, in fact, are unusually well positioned to see this dimension - patterns repeated over a longstretch of time.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
See all collocations with stretch