use of word ablaze

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
1

Her eyes were ablazed with excitement or should it be Her eyes were ablaze with excitement and why?
Can “ed” be added to an adjective?

  1. I understood the meaning of the word abnegation, but when do we use it? Any common examples.

  2. There are abound professionals in this field. Is is this sentence construction correct with the word abound?

  3. A small area of my leg thumb skin got scrapped. Can this sentence construction be better and short.

  4. Do we say my bag was wearing or wearing off?

2

[I shall leave this one to other members; however, I believe that you mean “scraped,” not “scrapPed.”

***** NOT A TEACHER *****

Hello, Hardwork:

  1. I have made a few notes next to your questions.

  2. May I share a secret with you? If you ask only one question per thread, you will get more and faster answers.

a. In other words, you could have posted 4 separate questions.

James

3
  1. As James indicates.
  2. as James indicates, however, this is not a common-place word and you will not hear it used in everyday conversation, so in answer to the question, ‘when do we use it?’ my suggestion would be, 'don’t, unless there are special circumstances. Usually, use ‘renunciation’ or ‘rejection’ instead.
  3. As James indicates.
  4. ‘leg thumb’ does not make any sense to me. I agree with James that you mean ‘scraped’.
4

Hi Hardwork,

Just to add to what James and Beeesneeees have already said:

  1. The word ‘ablaze’ is an adjective, and adding an -ed ending is not something that you would do with that word. However, we do use ‘blaze’ as a verb, and endings such as -ing or -ed can be added to that verb. In your sentence, you could replace ‘ablaze’ with ‘blazing’. You can NOT replace the word ‘ablaze’ with ‘blazed’ without also removing the word ‘were’.

  2. The word ‘abnegation’ is not generally used in everyday colloquial English. So, in that respect, it is not a ‘commonly used’ word. I’d say it would mainly be used in some academic writing. For examples of usage, you might try checking either the BNC or COCA: corpus.byu.edu/coca/

  3. No, the word ‘abound’ is not used correctly. The verb ‘abound’ basically means ‘be abundant’. You can reword the sentence in one of these ways:

  • Professionals are abundant in this field. / There are abundant professionals in this field. (The second sentence in this pair is a bit less elegant, in my opinion.)

  • Professionals abound in this field.

  1. I don’t know what you mean by “leg thumb skin” since a person’s thumb is not part of their leg…
    The correct way to spell the past form of the verb ‘scrape’ is ‘scraped’.
    The correct way to spell the past form of the verb ‘scrap’ is ‘scrapped’.

[color=darkblue]_____________________________________________________________
[size=75]“The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.” ~ Ayn Rand[/size]

5

:slight_smile: By “leg thumb”, Hardwork probably means “big toe”. So how about one of these:

The skin on my big toe got scraped slightly. (This sounds a bit off to me though, not sure why.)
I got a slight/small scrape on my big toe.
I superficially scraped my big toe.

(By the way, Hardwork, did you edit your fourth question and add a fifth one after receiving replies?)

6

In that case, I’d probably go for ‘I scraped the skin on my big toe.’

Question 5.
Hardwork, do you mean a bag (for carrying things) was becoming thin and worn and in danger of breaking?
If so, the term is ‘my bag was wearing out.’