Example sentences for: phrases

How can you use “phrases” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:

  • But the larger vocabulary of English is irrelevant in two respects: much of this larger vocabulary is esoteric, exotic, pedantic, or otherwise as foreign to everyday English usage as Chinese; and whereas vocabulary is quantified by words, the expressive units of French tend to be phrases, such as chemin de fer, joie de vivre , and raton laveur . By the usual lexical reckoning one could say that French has no word for rail-road or raccoon .

  • Can you include the phrases "all you can eat" and "fajitas"?

  • (No article has appeared in any publication for at least six months without either of these phrases.)

  • A dictionary is a reference book, not a text, and, with few exceptions, its purpose is to provide a reliable source of information about the words and phrases one looks up.

  • Fred Shapiro is perhaps the most skilled researcher in this area, and he's been able to find incredibly early examples of words and phrases: "politically correct" from the 18 th century, or "hopefully" in its disputed sense--"it is to be hoped"--from numerous very formal sources in the 1930s through the 1950s, showing that the usage didn't simply pop up ex nihilo in the 1960s.


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