tap into

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English[edit]

Verb[edit]

tap into (third-person singular simple present taps into, present participle tapping into, simple past and past participle tapped into)

  1. To establish a connection with (something), especially in order to take advantage.
  2. To access (a resource or object).
    When he ran out of money, he decided to tap into his trust fund.
    • 2004 Mark-Anthony Falzon - Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora
      A significant number of Sindhi businesses in London tap into their connections with India and elsewhere to cater for the 'ethnic niche' market.
    • 19 December 2014, Paul M Farber in The Guardian Online, Die-ins demand that we bear witness to black people's fears that they'll be next
      Though the current wave of die-ins began after grand juries in Ferguson and New York City refused to indict the cops who used lethal force against Michael Brown and Eric Garner, they tap into a deep well of what professor Salamishah Tillet calls “civic estrangement” from a state that ignores excessive police violence against black and brown people.
    • 2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 10:
      Each language has its own distinct phonological qualities which a counter can tap into with effect. It is not necessarily specific phonemes (though these can sometimes be diagnostic), but rather the frequency and phonotactic distribution of each disparate set of phonemes that go together in the speech stream in certain recognisable ways.
    • 2022 September 21, Howard Johnston, “Bluebell Railway ready to advance 'through' railway”, in RAIL, number 966, page 23:
      The Bluebell Railway, which ended its long isolation from the national network with the reopening to East Grinstead nine years ago, is keen to tap into a much larger population within easy travelling distance.

Anagrams[edit]