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Glite Dictionary
🚫 To remove 💡 Main point 🥡 To buy food to go
to take away

to take away

5 2.4
To buy cooked food to eat somewhere else
  • phrasal verb
  • /ˈteɪk əˈweɪ/
  • UK
translation icon : pedir para llevar
  • So we're going to grab some take away food and head to the beach.

Examples

  • On Friday nights, we love to get take away from our favorite curry restaurant to enjoy at home.

  • Yeah, in Europe we tend to eat take away, take away, take out less.

  • It's nice to come back and we've got a take away pizza in bed.

  • So my mum, we wanted Chinese take away, but we couldn't always afford it.

  • Alfie and I also decided that tonight is a take away pizza night, so I'm very excited.

  • We have take away from Dim Foo's!

    Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (2006)

  • The Nando's at home celebrating Friday the right way with a take away with the Beanie Burger.

  • After a long day, I ordered Chinese take away to make dinner easy.

  • When we visited the new pizza place, we decided to take away a large pepperoni pizza for the family.

Synonyms

to take out
vsto take away
  • US
19 2.6

To buy cooked food from a restaurant to eat somewhere else

refers specifically to buying cooked food from restaurants or food outlets to eat elsewhere

Antonyms

to eat in
31 1.1

Have a meal at home instead of going to a restaurant

Surface Forms

take away infinitive
taking away present participle
takes away third person singular
took away past
taken away past participle

Morphology

take + away

The noun sense 'takeaway' (main point) is a metaphorical nominalization of 'take away' — you figuratively 'take away' (remove/keep) a lesson from an event. Knowing 'take' and 'away' helps learners infer this abstract meaning, but the mapping from physical removal to an abstract lesson is metaphorical rather than strictly compositional, so it is not fully predictable without some exposure.

Etymology

Take away comes from shops and restaurants that let customers carry cooked food out the door, so you imagine buying a boxed meal and walking away with it, or take it away. That is why it means 'to buy cooked food to eat somewhere else'.