to come to
- phrasal verb
- /kʌm tu/
- After the long day, he finally came to in bed, confused about how he got there.
- a patient came to
And then I like kind of came to and it all stopped.
- And then I like kind of came to and it all stopped.
Examples
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And then I like kind of came to and it all stopped.
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Two daughters of Mau Mau freedom fighters came to the cathedral and offered inspirational tales.
Academic text (1994) -
Maybe he came to.
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Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
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Case patients with moderate-to-severe diarrhea were enrolled when they came to a health clinic.
Academic text (2015) -
After falling off his bike, he slowly came to and realized he was lying on the ground.
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She was unconscious for a few minutes but eventually came to and started looking around.
Synonyms
To make a person conscious again after fainting
Wake up and become calm after fainting or shock
How Conscious
Surface Forms
Morphology
come + to
The verb 'come' carries the meaning 'arrive at a state' and the particle/preposition 'to' marks the target, so 'come to (a realization)' can be interpreted as 'arrive at a realization' — a composition that a learner who knows the constituents can often infer. However, 'come to' is polysemous (e.g. 'regain consciousness', 'amount to') and the precise idiomatic usage with abstract nouns requires familiarity with the collocation, so it is not fully predictable in all contexts.
Etymology
Come to comes from the idea of a person 'coming back' to themselves after being out of it; when someone 'comes to' they move back into awareness, so it means 'to regain consciousness'.