gun for
Britishverb
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to search for in order to reprimand, punish, or kill
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to try earnestly for
he was gunning for promotion
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Pursue relentlessly so as to overcome or destroy. For example, He was sure they were gunning for him and asked for police protection , or The senator felt that the reporters were gunning for him with that article about his brother . [ Slang ; late 1800s]
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Go after in earnest, try hard to obtain. For example, He's been gunning for a raise all year . [ Slang ; mid-1900s]
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
“There is no smoking gun for today’s move, it just happens that the market is chasing the strongest earnings revisions possible, and in the midst of that, short term performance technicals got too extreme,” said the Goldman team.
From MarketWatch
Pretti, who was active in protests after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020, had carried a gun for several years, according to his ex-wife.
That equates to one gun for every seven Australians, the report says.
From BBC
OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 was the starting gun for the artificial-intelligence arms race that has lifted up the stock market and unleashed billions of dollars of investment.
From MarketWatch
The staging of the former’s broomstick flights is “Top Gun” for tween girls, and her castle in the sky is a strangely scary redoubt somewhere between Tim Burton and a German Expressionist film.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
