taking out

Verb

take out (third-person singular simple present takes out, present participle taking out, simple past took out, past participle taken out)

1. To remove.
   • Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn...1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, →OCLC; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans...
2. To escort someone on a date.
   • Let me take you out for dinner.
3. (idiomatic) To immobilize with force; to subdue; to incapacitate.
   • I don't know if he's close by. He's unarmed, though. He lost his gun when I took him out.2007, Julia Spencer-Fleming, In the Bleak Midwinter (fiction), →ISBN
4. (transitive) To obtain by application by a legal or other official process.
   • take out a loan; take out medical insurance; take out a membership; take out a patent
5. (idiomatic, slang) To kill or destroy.
   • The soldiers were instructed to take out the enemy base by any means necessary.
6. (idiomatic, slang) To stun, amaze; to kill.
   • These photos are taking me out.

See all 7 meanings of take out