Las Vegas
156
1.8
- proper noun
- /læs ˈveɪɡəs/
:
Las Vegas
- I love Las Vegas!
- Las Vegas, Nevada
- conference in Las Vegas
- annual Las Vegas conference
Yeah, I am in Las Vegas at the David Copperfield Theatre.
- Yeah, I am in Las Vegas at the David Copperfield Theatre.
- But anyway, so he was driving back from Las Vegas in my car.
- Casinos in Las Vegas have banned Glass for obvious reasons.
- I mean, Las Vegas is the, I think, premier example of this.
- But other than that, I'm about to go to LA and Las Vegas.
- But Fred is a close friend of mine in Las Vegas.
- I sat next to Stephen Baldwin on a Southwest Airline flight to Las Vegas.
- You could watch most of ADCC Saturday and then Saturday night in Las Vegas.
- And we should say that that is a run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
- San Diego, the House of Blues, Las Vegas, all before the end of July.
- I don't remember who's like a like a West Coast Las Vegas fucking Kendrick.
Examples
-
We are going to fly to fabulous Las Vegas for Steve Martin's midnight show.
-
The Sunday morning bullet from Las Vegas to L.A. was half-full, with many people returning from watching last night's fights.
Fiction book (2001) -
Yeah, I went to see went to Las Vegas to see a fight.
-
But anyway, so he was driving back from Las Vegas in my car.
-
We came back from Las Vegas this afternoon.
-
We flew this young lady in from Las Vegas.
-
Coming back to Las Vegas was a journey that took fourteen years and thousands of miles.
Academic text (2014) -
I won twelve hundred dollars playing the slots in Las Vegas.
Fiction book (2001) -
Rolling Stone reports Adele has just announced a Las Vegas residency.
-
We are going to fly to fabulous Las Vegas for Steve Martin's midnight show.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Las + Vegas
This is a toponym: the meaning 'a city in Nevada known for casinos and entertainment' cannot be derived from the surface parts 'Las' and 'Vegas', which are not English lexical items a B1 learner would treat compositionally (they resemble Spanish article+noun but do not convey the city's properties). Proper names are arbitrary and must be learned as single lexical items rather than composed from their constituents, so the expression is opaque.
Etymology
Las Vegas comes from Spanish: las means 'the' and vegas means 'meadows', because early Spanish explorers found green fields and water in a desert valley. So the name shows the place began as wet, grassy land, even though today it is famous for casinos and nightlife.