bound up
13
6.0
- phrasal verb
- My happiness is bound up with the well-being of my family.
- inextricably bound up
- intimately bound up
- closely bound up
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Watch on YouTubeOK, but it's also bound up in faux virtue as well.
- OK, but it's also bound up in faux virtue as well.
- It is also, you know, bound up with rebellions against the state.
- So it knows that and does it and is bound up with it as with its own nature.
- So it's all because we're so bound up in our day-to-day scale of observation.
- And historically that was always bound up with music.
- I'm going to include remarks about the ethical because I it seems to me they're bound up very much in what we've seen.
- When I see somebody struggling with that drug addiction or alcohol and never do I look down upon it because I know they're just bound up with these chains, man.
- Without getting bound up with these kinds of analogies, I think analogies of that kind lead us astray.
- It's, it's every one of the things and all of them bound up together.
Examples
-
Her whole world was bound up in Terry now, and Terry was going to die.
Fiction book (1999) -
And historically that was always bound up with music.
-
All those factors are so bound up with race, in fact.
-
So it knows that and does it and is bound up with it as with its own nature.
-
Her role might well have been bound up with the transfer of property.
Fiction book (1994) -
All that is very much bound up in his work on the absurd.
-
Accordingly, his responses to art were bound up with ideas about politics and history.
Academic text (1991) -
Even the fundamental purposes of education are inextricably bound up with the problem of freedom.
Academic text (2003) -
At the grassroots level, the doctrinal issues became bound up with personality and local factional disputes.
Academic text (2000) -
Barry was now bound up in an inextricable toil of bills and debts, of mortgages and insurances and in all the evils attendant upon them.
Synonyms
∞
3.5
Connected to something because you take part in it
93
4.0
Busy with something and cannot do other things
55
4.8
Very interested and completely involved in something
24
4.1
Joined so each part affects and depends on the others
9
6.4
People or groups that are very close and stay together most of the time
4
7.5
Caught up in something so you cannot easily leave
2
6.7
Very involved in a difficult or serious problem
Being very busy with a lot of difficult work or problems
Antonyms
How Involved
Surface Forms
Morphology
The adjective 'bound up' evokes the literal idea of being 'tied' (bound) and 'up' functions as an intensifier or directional particle, so a learner who knows the constituents can partially infer a sense of being closely tied or entangled with something. However, the figurative extension to 'deeply involved' or 'emotionally absorbed' is metaphorical and uses the prepositional pattern (bound up in/with) in an idiomatic way, so the meaning is not fully predictable for a B1 learner.
Etymology
The phrase bound up shows the picture of two things bound and up with rope, held so tightly they cannot move. So if someone is bound up with a person, job, or idea, their life is 'closely connected' to it and they are very involved.