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hide and go seek

hide and go seek

5 1.3
A children's game where one person counts with eyes closed and finds hidden players
  • noun
  • /haɪd ənd ɡoʊ siːk/
translation icon : escondite
  • But late one night, me and the other kids were playing hide and go seek in the basement.
  • play hide and go seek
  • game of hide and go seek

I mean, he's the hide and go seek champ, really when you think about it.

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Examples

Synonyms

hide-and-seek
vshide and go seek
48 1.0

A children's game where one child closes their eyes, counts, then finds the others

has identical meaning but appears as separate words without hyphens

How Physical

tackle
  • US
40 3.5
dodgeball
22 2.3
slag tag
  • Baby Talk
9.5
tag
58 1.0
hide and go seek
5 1.3

Surface Forms

Morphology

hide + and + go + seek

The meaning is directly built from the constituent verbs: players hide and another player 'goes' to 'seek' them, so knowing 'hide', 'go' and 'seek' allows a learner to infer it's a game of hiding and finding. This coordinated-action construction is cross-linguistically common and follows straightforward compositional logic, making it immediately comprehensible to a B1 learner who knows the words.

Etymology

Hide and go seek is a children's game where some players hide while one player closes their eyes, counts, and then 'goes to seek' the hidden players. The clear picture of someone hiding and another person going to find them is why the name means that game today.