life support
42
3.4
- noun
- /laɪf səˈpɔrt/
- Specialized
:
soporte vital
- The doctors worked tirelessly to ensure that the patient remained on life support while they stabilized his condition.
- patient on life support
- a life support system
- withdrawal of life support
Then my mother tripped and hit her head and was taken off life support.
- Then my mother tripped and hit her head and was taken off life support.
- The purpose of doing CPR is to allow time for first responders to arrive to then give advanced cardiac life support.
- But I had three days of life support.
- So imagine you're Ghilane and your brother is just on life support and he can't even communicate with you.
- The babies are going to going to die and the talk is about withdrawing life support treatment.
- And that was what it was like being such a quadriplegic on life support for months.
- But, you know, terminating life support on somebody, by the time you're at that stage, they've done brain tests to see if there's any brain activity.
Examples
-
After days in the intensive care unit, the family was relieved to hear that their loved one was still on life support during surgery.
-
Is he on life support?
-
Eventually, we had to take him off life support.
-
The donor is still on life support.
-
During those first weeks, as Zack lay on life support, the words "What if?" haunted his parents.
Academic text (2011) -
By that night, Zack had lapsed into a coma and was on life support.
Academic text (2011) -
For 18 days, she was on life support and in a medically induced coma.
Blog text (27) -
He's on life support.
-
We have accepted as a society for 20 years the allowance for physicians to terminate life support for terminally ill patients.
Academic text (1996) -
While he was on life support, the medical team monitored his vital signs around the clock to keep him alive.
Synonyms
13
4.0
Equipment that keeps a person alive by doing the body's most important jobs
1
8.2
A device that helps a person breathe when they are not breathing
Antonyms
How Life-Sustaining
- Specialized
9
6.0
- Specialized
3
5.1
- Specialized
42
3.4
- Specialized
38
4.6
15
3.4
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'support' that is for 'life' = assistance essential for survival, so a learner who knows both words can infer the medical or figurative sense. This construction is transparent and parallels expressions in many languages, making it readily understandable to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Life support comes from the clear image of life being held up by support. It names machines that help breathing or the heart so a person can stay 'alive'.