drive home
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English
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[edit]Audio (General Australian): (file)
Verb
[edit]drive home (third-person singular simple present drives home, present participle driving home, simple past drove home, past participle driven home)
- (transitive) To push something into position completely by force.
- 1969, James Plunkett, Strumpet City, page 396:
- He grunted as he drove each nail home.
- 1996, Harry Harrison, One King's Way, page 186:
- Karli shook himself, drove home the last nail with a flat stone, straightened up.
- 2004, Judith Tarr, Queen of the Amazons, page 293:
- Just as Ione began to slow, she struck Ione's sword aside and drove her own blade home.
- (figurative, transitive) To emphasize (a point) with tangible or powerful demonstration.
- 1905, Edith Wharton, chapter 14, in The House of Mirth, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC:
- She had dropped sideways in Gerty's big arm-chair, her head buried where lately Selden's had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to Gerty's aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat.
- 1919 October 20, Virginia Woolf, chapter XXII, in Night and Day, London: Duckworth and Company […], →OCLC:
- Anything, she thought, was better than bickering or the strange silence which drove home to her the distance between them.
- 2021 June 14, Mark Landler, “Boris Johnson’s ‘Global Britain’ Makes Shaky Start at G7 Summit”, in The New York Times[1], →ISSN:
- The urgent need for vaccines was driven home by the expected postponement on Monday of Britain’s plan to reopen, caused by the spread of a variant known as Delta among the unvaccinated population.
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see drive, home.
- He decided not to drive home right away.
- He was afraid he would doze off on the long drive home.