ground-breaking ceremony
- noun
- /ˈɡraʊndˌbreɪkɪŋ ˈsɛrəˌmoʊni/
- Formal
:
ceremonia de inauguración
- We are all invited to the ground-breaking ceremony for the solar energy project in our town.
Examples
-
I won't be late for the ground-breaking ceremony.
-
A large crowd gathered to celebrate the ground-breaking ceremony of the new high school.
-
The mayor will speak at the ground-breaking ceremony for the new community center next week.
Synonyms
37
3.7
The official start of an event or activity
11
4.4
A ceremony that marks the start of construction by digging the first bit of soil
9
5.8
A ceremony that marks the official start of a new job, office, or event
4
3.9
An event that marks the start of building work, often with people turning the first soil
1
5.0
Showing new ideas or marking the start of building work
How Official
- Formal
63
6.0
- Formal
901
2.5
∞
1.0
7
2.7
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is directly compositional: 'ground-breaking' refers to the act of breaking ground to start construction and 'ceremony' is an event, so a B1 learner who knows those constituents can infer it marks the start of a building project. This is a common, literal construction found across many languages, making the meaning immediately predictable from the parts.
Etymology
Ground-breaking ceremony comes from the simple image of people using shovels to break the ground, meaning the earth, for the first time on a building site. That first act of breaking the soil shows the official 'start of construction', so the phrase now means the ceremony that begins a project.