direct object

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Related to direct object: indirect object

direct object

A word or phrase in a sentence referring to the person or thing receiving the action of a transitive verb. For example, in English, in mail the letter and call him, letter and him are direct objects.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

direct object

(Grammar) grammar a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase whose referent receives the direct action of a verb. For example, a book is the direct object in the sentence They bought Anne a book. Compare indirect object

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

direct′ ob′ject

a word or group of words representing the person or thing upon which the action of a verb is performed or toward which it is directed, as the pronoun it in I saw it.

[1900–05]

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Noun

direct object - the object that receives the direct action of the verb

object of the verb

object - (grammar) a constituent that is acted upon; "the object of the verb"

Translations

complément d’objet directobjet direct

direct object

n (Gram) → direktes Objekt, Akkusativobjekt nt

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

References in classic literature ?

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

View in context

Bounderby always represented this to be the sole, immediate, and direct object of any Hand who was not entirely satisfied; 'and therefore I know already that you have not come here to make a complaint.

View in context

The comparative analysis of the different types of verbs used in this category exemplifies that direct object verbs occurred with the highest frequency, evidence based / data driven verbs occurred with second higher frequency, procedural verbs with third, creation verbs with fourth; whereas, visual verbs occurred with the least frequency.

A corpus based study of Specificity of Academic Verbs in Introduction sections of PhD Dissertations in English Studies in Pakistan

prepositioning of a direct object, unusual in English, is common in

Catching Fire: "The Windhover"

"With direct object printing, custom machinery and custom inks to accomplish printing and decorating that wasn't possible several years ago are now available," Lambert said.

DIGITAL PRINTING AND PACKAGING: Inkjet ink manufacturers are seeing more opportunities in the packaging segment as well as other industrial applications

A7--Missing Function Level Access Control: A missing or improperly configured user access control system can grant users the ability to perform functions above their level (this vulnerability has some overlap with A4--Insecure Direct Object Reference).

Vulnerability Assessment of Some Key Nigeria Government Websites

If we slip and consider the car the direct object of the anger,

Cognitive emotion and the law

In prototypical contexts in German, there is a correlation between the agent and the function of the subject, the patient and the function of the direct object and the recipient and the indirect object.

Analysing Case in Spoken Language: A Corpus Study on East Franconian Dialects

For instance, humans might label parts of speech in a set of texts, and the machine-learning system will try to identify patterns that resolve ambiguities-for instance, when "her" is a direct object and when it's an adjective.

Artificial-Intelligence System Surfs Web to Improve Its Performance

Hatred here is intransitive - it has no direct object. It's just hatefulness, as an end in itself.

Don't make excuses for tree vandals, make 'em pay

She reconstructs choices and explains motivations as she looks at ditransitives--grammatical constructions involving a verb followed by an indirect object and a direct object. Chapters present the theoretical background, clarify the methodology, and provide a broad overview of transitives found in data sets represented by the Freiberg English Dialect Corpus (FRED) and the British National Corpus Regional (BNCreg).