0 to start to have a direct and noticeable effect (on something):
The government is definitely making inroads into the problem of unemployment.
We have not been able to make much of an inroad into the backlog of work.
1 something that has a noticeable and positive effect on something you are trying to achieve:
2 to start to have a noticeable and positive effect on something:
They made inroads on their own traditional attachment to ' capital ' and implemented a tax on short-term capital gains in 1962.
In telecommunications, actors with strong preferences in favour of liberalisation were beginning to make substantial inroads into the policy process.
This cost will become the focus of attention if eco-forestry and directly subsidized forestry projects make significant inroads into areas earmarked for industrial logging concessions.
Although the program made some significant inroads into racial inequalities, it also was greatly limited in that respect.
There is no doubt that further researches will reveal more medical applications and make further inroads into our understanding of the complexity of the brain.
In addition to these coproductions, women, through their own writing, make inroads in literacy that match their assumption of heretofore male occupations.
This latency period is now over and at present molecular biology techniques are making inroads in all fields of clinical medicine.
By then the battle against competitions, and by extension, against corporate inroads into the profession, had been lost.
