drive home

Verb

drive home (third-person singular simple present drives home, present participle driving home, simple past drove home, past participle driven home)

1. (transitive) To push something into position completely by force.
   • He grunted as he drove each nail home.1969, James Plunkett, Strumpet City, page 396
   • Karli shook himself, drove home the last nail with a flat stone, straightened up.1996, Harry Harrison, One King's Way, page 186
2. (figuratively, transitive) To emphasize (a point) with tangible or powerful demonstration.
   • She had dropped sideways in Gerty's big arm-chair, her head buried where lately Selden's had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to Gerty's aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat.1905, Edith Wharton, chapter XIV, in The House of Mirth, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC
   • Anything, she thought, was better than bickering or the strange silence which drove home to her the distance between them.1919 October 20, Virginia Woolf, chapter XXII, in Night and Day, London: Duckworth and Company […], →OCLC
3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see drive, home.
   • He decided not to drive home right away.
   • He was afraid he would doze off on the long drive home.

   Synonyms:

   hammer home, ram home