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vacuum-clean. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
vacuum-clean, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
vacuum-clean in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
vacuum-clean you have here. The definition of the word
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English
Etymology
Back-formation from vacuum cleaner.[1]
Verb
vacuum-clean (third-person singular simple present vacuum-cleans, present participle vacuum-cleaning, simple past and past participle vacuum-cleaned)
- (transitive) To clean with a vacuum cleaner.
Synonyms
Translations
to clean with a vacuum cleaner
References
- ^ Naděžda Stašková (2013) “English back-formation in the literature”, in English Back-Formation: Recent Trends in Usage: A Comprehensive Study of English Back-Formation in the 20th and the Early
21st Century, Plzeň: Západočeská univerzita v Plzni, →ISBN, page 25:
BF [Back-formation] (of the type vacuum cleaner > vacuum-clean) is less obvious, but it is a diachronical phenomenon, too, even if it is highly productive and produces semantically predictable results. As soon as a verb of the type vacuum-clean is formally derived by BF, it becomes semantically primary; thus, vacuum cleaner means ‘appliance designed to vacuum-clean with’; therefore, viewed synchronically, it is derived from the verb vacuum-clean.