to tee off
10
5.1
- phrasal verb
- /tiː ɔf/
:
sacar
- We're just about to tee off now.
- golfer tees off
- tee off at 6 a.m.
- player tees off
Yeah, it fucking teed off and teed off and hit a fucking house.
- Yeah, it fucking teed off and teed off and hit a fucking house.
- But OK, when you go to tee off or go to do your just say, like, I dedicate this to you or this is to you for you.
Examples
-
What time do I tee off?
-
Let's tee off.
-
We, uh, tee off in 15 minutes.
-
We tee off in 10 minutes.
-
We tee off at noon.
-
The leaders will tee off at 9:45 a.m.
Blog text (27) -
James is teeing off.
Blog text (3) -
We sat on a bench outside the clubhouse, blowing into our hands to keep them warm, watching the foursome ahead of us tee off.
Fiction book (2002) -
The threesome of Justin Thomas, Will Zalatoris, and Happy Gilmore is about to tee off.
-
We're just about to tee off now.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Knowing 'tee' as the peg/place where a golf ball sits and 'off' as indicating movement away/from, a B1 learner can compositionally infer 'to strike a golf ball from the teeing ground'. The meaning follows a straightforward verb+particle pattern and is thus directly derivable from the constituents.
Etymology
Tee off comes from golf: you put the ball on a small wooden peg called a tee and then hit it to start a hole. So tee off means 'to hit the golf ball from the tee' or simply 'to start a hole'.