proving ground
3
5.6
- noun
- /ˈpruːvɪŋ ɡraʊnd/
:
campo de pruebas
- Far from being a historical footnote, Copper Age Europe was a technological and social proving ground.
Examples
-
Far from an isolated backwater, the town was both cradle and proving ground for some of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.
Academic text (2018) -
And the Black Sea, once the proving ground of the Turkish and Soviet navies, suddenly became a much friendlier place.
Academic text (2009) -
Enough still exists for visitors to get a sense of how the proving ground operated.
Academic text (2004) -
Academic laboratories, like this one at the University of Michigan, serve as proving grounds for virtual reality techniques.
Academic text (2001) -
Today, visitors can clamber around what's left of the proving ground.
Academic text (2004) -
Its research will likely spur advances in these fields, if only by providing a proving ground for new technology.
Fiction book (2000) -
Many academic laboratories today serve as proving grounds for these technologies, which are then licensed, refined, and sold to the public by commercial developers.
Academic text (2001) -
Being a governor is an excellent proving ground for being president, as governors Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan demonstrated.
Blog text (19) -
The proving ground in Nevada became at once an outdoor laboratory, a space for war rehearsal, and an open-air film studio.
Academic text (2016) -
For most of its history, Le Mans has been a proving ground for new forms of automotive technology.
Synonyms
5
3.7
A place where people try new ideas or products to see if they work
2
4.4
A place with tools for checking how machines or programs work under real conditions
2
4.9
A place where people test machines, vehicles, or weapons
1
6.0
A place set up to try new ideas or products before they are used more widely
How Experimental
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is directly compositional: 'proving' is the act of testing/proving and 'ground' denotes a place or area, so 'proving ground' literally means a place for testing. This follows a regular English pattern (action+ground = location of the action) and would be inferable to a B1 learner who knows both constituents.
Etymology
Proving ground comes from the literal idea of a place where things were 'proved' on the open ground: the word proving means showing something works and ground is the land where armies and engineers tried new weapons and machines. So today proving ground means any place or situation where new ideas, products, or people's skills are tried and 'tested'.