to plank over
- phrasal verb
- Workers began to plank over the muddy pathway to create a temporary sidewalk.
Examples
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The old well was planked over to prevent accidents.
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After the flood, they had to plank over the damaged bridge for safe passage.
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They planked over the old floorboards.
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Don't forget to plank over the damaged areas!
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The construction team will plank over the damaged section of the deck for safety.
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To make the garden accessible, they decided to plank over the uneven ground.
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He plans to plank over the rotting boards on the porch before the winter.
Synonyms
Cover windows or doors with pieces of wood to protect them
Form a layer across a surface, like fog or icing
To cover something with a layer of material
To cover a path or floor with long flat boards
A surface or structure made of wooden boards
To cover a roof with thin flat stone tiles
To cover the outside of a building with long thin overlapping wooden boards
How Covered
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'to cover a surface with planks' is directly and compositionally derived from the noun/verb 'plank' (piece of timber) combined with the spatial/covering sense of 'over'. The verb+preposition pattern indicating placing something over a surface is a common, cross-linguistic composition, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer this meaning.
Etymology
The verb plank over comes from the simple picture of laying wooden boards across a hole, gap, or wet ground. When you put a plank over something to make a safe path, it came to mean 'to cover (a surface) with planks of wood'.