Word of the Day:
preoccupy
What It Means
To distract; to draw attention elsewhere.
To worry or concern (someone) so as to distract them.
To occupy or take possession of beforehand.
The father tried to preoccupy the child with his keys.
Preoccupy in Context
“Dr. Beeching's obvious intent is that if Scottish—and similarly unprofitable English and Welsh—railways are to be maintained, it must be done by an unconcealed subsidy; he is determined that the railways shall no longer be preoccupied with—and derided for—immense deficits which include the burden...”
Did You Know?
From pre- + occupy, after Middle French preoccuper, and its source, Latin praeoccupo, praeoccupare. Doublet of preoccupate, now obsolete.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: preoccupy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “preoccupy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/preoccupy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.