to draw blood
- phrasal verb
- /drɔ blʌd/
- Offensive
- All right, let's get a second line into him and draw some trauma blood work.
These are the people in your life who draw blood by ignoring your boundaries.
- These are the people in your life who draw blood by ignoring your boundaries.
- And to truly know what's going on in your body, you have to be drawing blood.
- Now what happens is is in PRP is they'll draw your own blood.
- She gets told the strip and scourged with a whip that actually draws some blood.
- And then finally, fact or fiction, your mom scolded Shane McMahon when he punched you in the face and drew blood.
- Holes in our skin drew blood for what?
- And so I'm going to show you this list of lab tests that I want you to ask for every time your doctor draws blood work at least once a year.
Examples
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PHOTO (COLOR): Study nurse Ellen Templeton draws blood from a study participant.
Academic text (2003) -
With anxiety like Chloe's, even something as routine as drawing blood is a challenge.
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Excuse me, sir, but I need to draw some more blood.
Fiction book (1994) -
...I'll need to draw some blood.
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It's probably just a cold, but just to make sure I'm gonna have my assistant draw some blood so we can run some tests.
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They draw more blood from me than I've ever had taken before.
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Look, we drew blood.
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I drew blood.
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LAB Ripley is sitting on a table as Gediman draws blood from her.
Fiction book (1997) -
The doctor will draw blood for the tests to check for any infections.
Synonyms
To take blood from a vein for medical tests
Antonyms
- Informal
Make blood loss end or prevent more harm in a difficult situation
How Much
- NSFW
- Offensive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'draw' as 'take/pull out' combined with 'blood' yields the medical sense of taking a blood sample or the literal sense of causing bleeding. Even if a learner only knows 'draw' as 'pull' rather than the clinical collocation, the intended action (removing or causing blood) is inferable, so the expression is immediately understandable to a B1 learner who knows the parts.
Etymology
The phrase draw blood comes from the old idea of draw meaning 'to pull out' and blood being what was pulled out. If someone was cut or a needle was used you would literally pull out blood, so today the phrase means both 'to take a blood sample' and 'to cause someone to bleed or be hurt'.