to shoot down
149
4.4
- phrasal verb
- /ʃut daʊn/
- 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
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Watch on YouTubeThe 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
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Authorities confirmed that they had to shoot down a fighter jet that threatened their defense zone.
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Did the Russians shoot down those planes?
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Tougher to shoot down a plane.
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Only man to shoot down three enemy planes in the last 40 years.
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Now on the first pass, we shot down the escort plane.
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Strike fighters are getting shot down.
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You mean he shot down seven German planes?
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The Israeli scattered their jets and shot down all but seven.
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You have authorization to shoot down any aircraft deemed a threat.
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Another plane made a suicide dive on the task group and was shot down by antiaircraft fire.
Fiction book (1993)
Synonyms
∞
5.5
Cause someone or something to fall and be defeated
267
3.3
Move something or someone from a higher to a lower place, for example land an aircraft
75
7.4
To shoot someone, often causing serious harm or death
Antonyms
How Damaging
∞
1.0
149
4.4
109
6.3
267
3.3
323
1.4
35
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'.