Fall, fell, felled - English Language Usage Stack Exchange causative: fell, felled, has be felled, as opposed to intransitive: fall, fell, has fallen However, felling a dynasty or regime, or anything except a man, animal, or tree, is pretty rare today; OED 1 was already marking it as obsolete in 1895 Topple (in the transitive use) is more common EDIT -- taking a healthy bite of my words
Is it falling or felling? [closed] - English Language Usage Stack . . . Felling is associated with the idea of (some agent) making the subject fall, while falling refers simply to the subject's fall fell verb 1 Cut down (a tree) ‘33 million trees are felled each day’ 1 1 Knock down ‘Whitlock felled him with one punch’ - ODO fall verb 4 (no object, with adverbial) Be captured or defeated ‘their mountain strongholds fell to enemy attack’ - ODO Use
grammaticality - Why can’t you say “I fell the stairs”? - English . . . Down in the phrase He fell down the stairs is an adverb, as is off in the following: She fell off her bicycle Although in both instances the person ends up on the ground, in the latter we don't normally say: "She fell down from her bicycle" Consider someone who falls down on their knees, you'd never say: "fall onto their knees"
Why is dog in underdog? - English Language Usage Stack Exchange -3 Does it come from pioneer days of sawing trees by hand? Top dog was the one on top, and clean, underdog was the one in the pit below the felled tree sawing away getting covered in sawdust
Difference between fell to the ground vs. fell on the ground What is the difference between the following two: A young bird was flying in cold weather; after awhile, her wings froze up and she fell to the ground A young bird was flying in cold weather; after
Were Fell and Fel both correct spellings? Both are attested Before Modern English, there were really no overarching prescriptivist entities, so the concept of "correct" spellings didn't exist What we have are attested spellings, sometimes numbering in the hundreds for a single word The Middle English Dictionary is the best free resource I know of for seeing attested Middle English spellings For fel (adjective), it shows quotes with
Is there a word for the material of a forest floor? I was in a forest last weekend and spent some time enjoying the texture of the forest floor - even now in the summer, it consists primarily of slowly decaying dry leaves and twigs: I thought I had