come from

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word come from. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word come from, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say come from in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word come from you have here. The definition of the word come from will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofcome from, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.

English

Etymology

From Middle English comen from.

Verb

come from (third-person singular simple present comes from, present participle coming from, simple past came from, past participle come from)

  1. (transitive) To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
    Most tourists in Mallorca come from England.   My girlfriend comes from Sweden.
    • 1822 June–July (date written), Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Triumph of Life”, in Mary W Shelley, editor, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London: for John and Henry L Hunt, , published 1824, →OCLC, page 89:
      Thou comest from the realm without a name, []
    • 1883, Howard Pyle, “Robin Hood turns Butcher”, in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood , New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons , →OCLC, part second, page 48:
      Not so much as one farthing would I take from thee, for I love a fair Saxon face like thine right well; more especially when it cometh from Locksley Town, and most especially when the man that owneth it is to marry a bonny lass on Thursday next.
    • 1900 December – 1901 October, Rudyard Kipling, chapter IV, in Kim (Macmillan’s Colonial Library; no. 414), London: Macmillan and Co., published 1901, →OCLC, page 107:
      Hai, my son, thou hast never learned all that since thou camest from Belait (Europe). Who suckled thee?
    • 1906, Frederick D. Cloud, Hangchow, the "City of Heaven", Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, →OCLC, →OL, page 53:
      ACCORDING to various inscriptions about this famous temple we are told that it was erected to the memory of Ya Fei, "An Unswerving Guardian to the Heir-Apparent," of the Sung dynasty; "A Loyal-to-the-end Minister," who came from the ancient state of O-Kuo, the present Wu Ch'ang-fu of Hupei; and that it was erected by the Emperor Hsiao Tsung as an atonement for the weakness and follies of his father, Kao Tsung, toward a faithful servant of the empire who came to his untimely death through the diabolical schemes of men in high estate. Moreover, that after his death and burial, when the empire came to appreciate his great services to the people, the posthumous title of " Prince of O-Kuo" was bestowed upon his sacred memory.
    • 1993 December 12, Jim Sheridan, Terry George, In the Name of the Father, spoken by Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis), distributed by Universal Pictures:
      To explain how I happened to be in England in 1974 at the time of the bombing, I better take you back to Northern Ireland, where I come from.
    • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:come from.
  2. (transitive) To be derived from.
    • 2013 July-August, Lee S. Langston, “The Adaptable Gas Turbine”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 4, page 264:
      Turbines have been around for a long time—windmills and water wheels are early examples. The name comes from the Latin turbo, meaning vortex, and thus the defining property of a turbine is that a fluid or gas turns the blades of a rotor, which is attached to a shaft that can perform useful work.
  3. (transitive, slightly informal) To derive one's opinion or argument from; to take as a conceptual starting point.
    Antonyms: drive at, get at
    Even though I have a more progressive philosophy, I can understand where he's coming from. There was a time in my life when it was hard for me to adapt to change, myself.

Conjugation

Conjugation of come from
infinitive (to) come from
present tense past tense
1st-person singular come from came from
2nd-person singular come from, comest from came from, camest from
3rd-person singular comes from, cometh from came from
plural come from
subjunctive come from came from
imperative come from
participles coming from came from

Archaic or obsolete.

Translations

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.