work your way through ..., round....

work your way can be used literally ( ie work meaning work) or figuratively using progress, or move from one point to another. In the latter meaning there are thousands of uses :

• It took me some time to work my way through the files.
• Start with your toes and slowly work your way up to your head.
• Like players, referees should have to work their way up to this level.
• the children were expected to work their way through a maths text book with no specific instruction from the teacher
• Weedkillers and pesticides work their way up the food chain from plants
• The creatures work their way in through gratings and airbricks.

All these examples came from the concordancer SARA. Just type in "work my way" or "work his way" etc and you'll get a page with fifty authentic examples from the British National Corpus

Thanks a lot Sue. You're much better than my Oxford Advanced dictionary!!

michè wrote:You're much better than my Oxford Advanced dictionary!!

I'll second that! 🙂