to operate on
47
4.6
- phrasal verb
- /ˈɑːpəreɪt ɒn/
- Specialized
:
operar a
- The doctor will operate on the patient to remove the tumor.
- operate on a patient
- operate on the ear
Well, none of the adult neurosurgeons would operate on him for good reason.
- Well, none of the adult neurosurgeons would operate on him for good reason.
- Send Beethoven to an autolaryngologist to be operated on to correct his growing deafness.
- She's no, he's refusing to to be operated on until he sees me.
- And so we filmed there with surgeons as they operated on war victims.
- But the most accurate way of determining that is to operate on the patient with her awake.
- And at one point she called me from the ICU after she had been operated on for lung cancer.
- If you go in to the doctor with a raging headache tomorrow, they don't operate on your brain.
- And he was like, we might need to get this operated on, taken out of your head and and checked for a tumor, some cancerous.
- For example, I quite often operate on people who have got ulcers, burst ulcers because of chronic ibuprofen use, for example.
- They said if you're not operated on, you have three months to live.
- Doctors operate on people without anesthesia or if there is the anesthesia that doesn't work and there's no medicine.
- And he tells me that in the middle of the operation, he rose up out of his body and looked down and saw the surgeon's operating on.
- And my mom, she was like in the operating room the whole like in the they would let her stand there as they were operating on me and you know, they're working on me.
- And whatever Sean Combs did or sat in that room, this guy wound up re operating on Cassie within a week.
Examples
-
- Are they gonna operate on us?
-
She's operating on our brother right now.
-
By the way, I need you to operate on me.
-
And they operated on her about six months ago.
-
I operated on your husband.
-
Father did not have much money left, yet it was necessary to operate on the girl.
Fiction book (1996) -
Doctors at the university operated on him all through the night.
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I can save his eye... but I'm going to have to operate on your son tonight.
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They're operating on him again now.
-
They're about to operate on him.
Synonyms
155
4.5
To do surgery on a person or animal to fix a health problem
How Invasive
- NSFW
1
9.9
- Specialized
47
4.6
337
1.0
28
6.2
868
2.5
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense 'to apply a procedure or operation to something' follows directly from combining 'operate' (to perform an operation/use controls) with the preposition 'on' (indicating the target). This verb + preposition pattern is a regular compositional construction found across languages and should be understandable to a B1 learner who knows both constituents.
Etymology
Operate on comes from the image of a doctor using tools and hands to operate on a patient's body, literally to 'work on' wounds or organs, so it means 'to do surgery on someone'.