to shoot down
207
4.4
- phrasal verb
- /ʃut daʊn/
:
derribar
- These planes were mostly shot down by Soviet supplied surface to air missiles supplied to the Egyptian and Syrian armies.
- shoot down a plane
- shoot down a civilian aircraft
The Israeli scattered their jets and shot down all but seven.
- The Israeli scattered their jets and shot down all but seven.
- And there were a few cases where it accidentally shot down a commercial airliner.
- We have to accept the reality that that involves shooting down Russian planes.
- OK, So and then when you would get shot down in the North Sea, you would freeze to death.
- So if you're flying low, you are going to get shot down, right?
- For the fire was a German Zeppelin being shot down, the first victim of incendiary bullets.
- Gray Zone reporting that the aircraft was shot down.
- This is the triangle of death, they call it, because the helicopters have been shot down.
- And even Taiwan said it would shoot down, you know, US planes if they tried to bomb TSMC, right?
- Obviously we shot down their their darn spy drone spy balloon over the weekend.
- There's a little bit of overlap in the reference to, you know, the Admiral Stockdale, the fighter pilot who got shot down, spent time in a Vietnamese prison camp.
Examples
-
Authorities confirmed that they had to shoot down a fighter jet that threatened their defense zone.
-
Did the Russians shoot down those planes?
-
Tougher to shoot down a plane.
-
Only man to shoot down three enemy planes in the last 40 years.
-
Now on the first pass, we shot down the escort plane.
-
Strike fighters are getting shot down.
-
You mean he shot down seven German planes?
-
The Israeli scattered their jets and shot down all but seven.
-
You have authorization to shoot down any aircraft deemed a threat.
-
Another plane made a suicide dive on the task group and was shot down by antiaircraft fire.
Fiction book (1993)
Synonyms
52
7.4
To shoot someone, often causing serious harm or death
51
5.5
Cause someone or something to fall and be defeated
15
3.3
Move something or someone from a higher to a lower place, for example land an aircraft
Antonyms
How Damaging
∞
1.0
207
4.4
72
6.3
15
3.3
885
1.4
31
3.7
Surface Forms
Morphology
shoot + down
The meaning 'to fire at an aircraft and force it to fall' is directly derivable from combining 'shoot' (to fire) with 'down' (to bring down/decline), since the particle 'down' adds direction/completion to the action. This verb + particle composition is a common, cross-linguistic pattern in English phrasal verbs, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would very likely infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Shoot down originally means to fire at a plane and make it go down into the ground. So it means to hit an aircraft or missile and force it to 'fall'.