Talk:chip away

chip away
Tagged for speedy deletion by, 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 . 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. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 21:55, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep. I think that chip lacks the figurative sense that chip away 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 ), 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". -- A LGRIF  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)