to play out
213
3.6
- phrasal verb
- /pleɪ aʊt/
:
desarrollarse
- The events surrounding the election will play out over the next few months.
- life plays out
- play out differently
- the drama plays out
How does this all play out with, you know, Congress?
- How does this all play out with, you know, Congress?
- But seeing it play out, it's, it's thrilling.
- Instead, the drama played out in the diplomatic realm.
- It just was, it just played itself out as badly as it could.
- It's a cautionary tale that plays out every single day.
- Well, we saw how that played itself out in this, this ethical world.
- And now I'm going to play us out anyway.
- And so we've seen this play out in the work we do.
Examples
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So how does this play out in practice?
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How do you see it playing out?
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And we're seeing that play out again and again.
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But how else does this relationship play out in the case of insurance?
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And we are seeing that play out here today.
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It's kind of how things have been playing out for me.
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We just had to sit back and watch it play out.
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But exactly how this drama will play out is an open question.
Academic text (2008) -
And so we've seen this play out in the work we do.
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You don't often see a thesis play out like this.
Antonyms
How Complete
208
3.1
- Formal
56
6.3
213
3.6
905
1.6
239
3.2
∞
1.0
Surface Forms
Morphology
play + out
The meaning 'to continue playing ... until it finishes' is directly derivable from combining 'play' (to take part in a game) with the particle 'out', which commonly signals completion or carrying something through to the end. This compositional phrasal-verb pattern is regular and cross-linguistically accessible, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can reasonably infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Play out may come from watching a story on stage, where the action plays and moves out scene by scene until the end. So when we say something will play out, we mean it will 'happen until it ends'.