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Main Entries
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These are the components of a typical main entry:
| destroy |
| VERB: |
1. To cause the complete ruin or wreckage of: bankrupt, break down, cross up, demolish, finish, ruin, shatter, sink, smash, spoil, torpedo, undo, wash up, wrack2, wreck. Slang: total. Idioms: put the kibosh on. See HELP. |
In the above example, the entry word destroy is followed by the part-of-speech label VERB. A boldface sense number, in this case 1., appears in all multisense entries, followed by a definition of the meaning shared by the entry word and its synonyms. In this example the definition of destroy and its synonyms is “to cause the complete ruin or wreckage of.” The synonyms are all substitutable for destroy
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| A colon introduces the list of words synonymous with destroy: bankrupt, break down, cross up, demolish, finish, ruin, shatter, sink, smash, spoil, torpedo, undo, wash up, wrack2, and wreck. Labeled synonyms, in this case, total with its label Slang, appear after the main list of synonyms. |
| When appropriate, idioms equivalent to the synonyms are shown at the end of a synonym list. These idioms are phrases with the same meaning as the basic meaning shared by all the synonyms. In the entry shown here, put the kibosh on is an idiom that is equivalent to destroy and its synonyms. Idioms are not listed as main entries. |
| Each synonym list concludes with a Category reference, such as See HELP in the entry destroy shown above. For an explanation of this see “Category Index.” |
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