turn over

Verb

turn over (third-person singular simple present turns over, present participle turning over, simple past and past participle turned over)

1. (transitive) To flip over; to rotate uppermost to bottom.
   • Turn over the box and look at the bottom.
   • The brakes were applied immediately, but the engine ran into a sand drag at approximately 20 m.p.h., plunged down the embankment, and turned over on its side at the bottom.1952 October, “Notes and News: Derailment near Shawford”, in Railway Magazine, page 710
2. (idiomatic, transitive) To relinquish; give back.
   • They turned over the evidence to the authorities.
3. (idiomatic, transitive) To transfer.
   • But what is to be done with our manufacturing population […] This one thing, of doing for them by ‘underselling all people,’ and filling our own bursten pockets and appetites by the road; and turning over all care for any ‘population,’ or human or divine consideration except cash only, to the...1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “ch. IX, Working Aristocracy”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, book III (The Modern...
4. (idiomatic, transitive) To produce, complete, or cycle through.
   • They can turn over about three hundred units per hour.
5. (transitive) To generate (a certain amount of money from sales).
   • The business turned over several million last year.
6. (transitive) To mull, ponder
   • Thus they dwelled for nearly a year, and in that time Robin Hood often turned over in his mind many means of making an even score with the Sheriff1883, Howard Pyle, chapter V, in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood […], New York, N.Y.: […] Charles Scribner’s Sons […], →OCLC
7. (intransitive, transitive) To spin the crankshaft of an internal combustion engine using the starter or hand crank in an attempt to make it run.
8. (transitive) To give up control (of the ball and thus the ability to score).
   • The Giants didn't turn the ball over in their last four games.
9. (transitive) To cause extensive disturbance or disruption to (a room, storage place, etc.), e.g. while searching for an item, or ransacking a property.
   • I've turned over the whole place, but I still can't find my glasses.
   • Thieves turned over the apartment while the owners were away on holiday.
10. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see turn, over.
    • The family feeling was intensified as we stopped to speak to mothers in the cottage gardens, or waved to distant tractors turning over chocolate-brown furrows and driven by 'my dad' or 'my Uncle Bob'.1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 217