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BE BORN
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (verb)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Come into existence through birth
Example:
She was born on a farm
Classified under:
Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.
Hypernyms (to "be born" is one way to...):
change state; turn (undergo a transformation or a change of position or action)
Troponyms (each of the following is one way to "be born"):
hatch (emerge from the eggs)
fall (be born, used chiefly of lambs)
come into being; come to life (be born or come into existence)
reincarnate; transmigrate (be born anew in another body after death)
Sentence frames:
Something ----s
Somebody ----s
Antonym:
die (pass from physical life and lose all bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain life)
Derivation:
birth (the event of being born)
birth (the process of giving birth)
birth (the time when something begins (especially life))
Context examples:
He told me that sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born in a family, with a red circular spot in the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should never die.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in—not properly born, till flood.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this—if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to the new.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
When we got into the street (which was strange enough to me) and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place an injustice; and said as much to Peggotty, who heard my expressions of delight with great complacency, and told me it was well known (I suppose to those who had the good fortune to be born Bloaters) that Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest place in the universe.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
She did not exist: she would not be born till to-morrow, some time after eight o'clock a.m.; and I would wait to be assured she had come into the world alive before I assigned to her all that property.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
He was tolerably stricken in years by this time; but, being a mild, meek, calm little man, had worn so easily, that I thought he looked at that moment just as he might have looked when he sat in our parlour, waiting for me to be born.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
