Talk:chip away

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chip away

Tagged for speedy deletion by Msh210 (talk • contribs), I moved it here. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:06, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Keep. I don't see how I get the meaning of 'reduce little by little' from chip +‎ away. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:54, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

It's the "To break small pieces from" sense of chip. SOP. I'm now tagging eat away also, with a link to this section.​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:55, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Keep. I think that chip#Verb lacks the figurative sense that chip away#Verb has. Encarta, MacMillan, and McGraw-Hill Idioms have it.

I'm not as sure about eat away but the same lemmings have that. DCDuring TALK 11:43, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Keep, I think. Pace DCDuring, "chip at" is sometimes used to mean "chip away at", including in figurative senses (see google news archive:"chipping at"), but it's not nearly so common as "chip away at". —Ruakh_TALK 12:13, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Keep. As commonly occurs with phrasal verbs, the sense is different enough to be a different definition. In this case the idea of multiple actions. Compare "I chipped the plate" with "I chipped away at the plate". Here "away" has a similar function to "up" in many phrasal verbs ... cf "I cut the paper" and "I cut up the paper". -- ALGRIF talk 17:22, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

kept -- Prince Kassad 09:05, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Move to "chip away at"?

This form is given as intransitive, with no mention of the almost-ubiquitous accompanying at. That's misleading. Equinox ◑ 04:33, 5 August 2018 (UTC)