Definition
advIn a direction away from the speaker or other reference point.
advInto a state of non-operation or non-existence.
Sentence Examples
I shouldn't have logged off.
It caught me off guard; I didn't know what to do.
He's had his beard shaved off.
Word Origin & History
Etymology tree
Proto-Indo-European *h₂ep
Proto-Indo-European *-o
Proto-Indo-European *h₂epó
Proto-Germanic *ab
Proto-West Germanic *ab
Old English æf
Old English of
Middle English of
English off
From Middle English of, from Old English of, af, æf (“from, off, away”), from Proto-West Germanic *ab, from Proto-Germanic *ab (“from”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂epo (“from, off, back”). Doublet of of.
Cognates
Cognate with Scots aff (“away, off”), Saterland Frisian oawe, ou (“from”), West Frisian ôf (“away, off”), Dutch af (“from, off”), German ab (“from, off”), German Low German, Luxembourgish of (“off”), Yiddish אָפּ (op, “off”), Danish, Icelandic af (“from, off”), Faroese, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk av (“off”), Swedish af, av (“off”), Gothic 𐌰𐍆 (af, “of, from”); and with Latin ab (“of, from, by”), Ancient Greek ἀπό (apó, “from”), and others.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"No matter how early I came down, I would find him on the veranda, smoking cigarettes, or[…]. And at last I began to realize in my harassed soul that all elusion was futile, and to take such holidays as I could get, when he was off with a girl, in a spirit of thankfulness."
— 1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC, page 46:
"So this was my future home, I thought![…]Backed by towering hills, the but faintly discernible purple line of the French boundary off to the southwest, a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams."
— 1908, W[illiam] B[lair] M[orton] Ferguson, chapter IV, in Zollenstein, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC:
"The Conception caught fire around 3:14 a.m. on Labor Day off Santa Cruz Island, about 20 miles away from the coast of mainland California. It was the last day of a three-day diving trip."
— 2019 September 27, Paul Vercammen, Steve Almasy, “ATF still looking to determine what caused deadly fire on California dive boat”, in CNN, archived from the original on 02 Oct 2019:
"The space had been sectioned off with colorful plastic shelves so that her textbooks rested on the bottom and her binders and personal effects lay across the middle."
— 2010, Jo Whittemore, Front Page Face-Off, page 113:
"'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?' With that pointed question, Ronald Reagan defined the 1980 presidential election as a 92 referendum on Jimmy Carter's economic policies"
— 2008, Kiron K. Skinner with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Serhiy Kudelia, The Strategy of Campaigning: