to beg for one's life
5
7.4
- idiom
- NSFW
:
suplicar por su vida
- You're going to hear a guy beg for his life, lady, 'cause he betrayed Nani Vitali.
- make him beg for his life
Examples
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That boy lay on the ground begging for his life, helpless, Roger.
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Well, I'm flattered... that you'd come to me to beg for your life.
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You want me to beg for my life?
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Looking forward to seeing your man beg for his life?
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You beg for your life.
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And while he was lying there on the floor, he begged for his life.
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He begged for his life.
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Well, I took him out in the lorry... and he begged for his life.
-
Duncan Homolka simply cries and begs for his life to be spared.
Fiction book (1994) -
He was forced to beg for his life after making a grave mistake.
Synonyms
256
1.6
To beg someone urgently and humbly for something
232
3.9
Ask someone urgently and emotionally for something
47
8.2
To ask someone earnestly for something
40
5.3
To ask someone very seriously to do or not do something
12
8.1
Ask someone in a serious, emotional way to do something
1
7.0
Ask someone for help or forgiveness while kneeling and looking very desperate
Antonyms
How Desperate
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'beg' (to plead) + 'for' (in order to obtain/protect) + 'one's life' (one's existence) yields the clear sense of pleading to avoid death or serious harm. This construction is cross-linguistically transparent and follows ordinary semantic composition, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words would readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Beg for one's life paints a simple image: a person on their knees, begging the person who has power over their life not to kill or hurt them. So it means 'to plead desperately with someone not to kill or seriously harm you'.