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preoccupy

verb
/pɹɪˈɒkjupaɪ/UK/pɹiˈɑkjupaɪ/US

Etymology

From pre- + occupy, after Middle French preoccuper, and its source, Latin praeoccupo, praeoccupare. Doublet of preoccupate, now obsolete.

  1. derived from praeoccupo
  2. derived from preoccuper

Definitions

  1. To distract

    To distract; to draw attention elsewhere.

    • The father tried to preoccupy the child with his keys.

  2. To worry or concern (someone) so as to distract them.

    • It always preoccupies me when he acts like this.

  3. To occupy or take possession of beforehand.

    • Terrified at this uproar, […] she ran for shelter into the place which was pre-occupied by the other lady […].

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at preoccupy. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01preoccupy02attention03romantic04romance05obsession06preoccupation07preoccupies

A definitional loop anchored at preoccupy. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

7 hops · closes at preoccupy

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA