Definition:
A noun or pronoun in a sentence that receives the action of a transitive verb.
See also:
Examples and Observations:
- "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
(George Orwell) - "A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it."
(E. B. White) - "Dinsdale, he was a nice boy. He nailed my head to a coffee table."
(Monty Python) - "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
(Monty Python) - "Since Mud Pond contained drinking water I had felt confident nothing untoward would happen there. For a long while the developers stayed away, until the drought of the mid-1960s. This event, squeezing the edges in, convinced the local water company that the pond really wasn't a necessity as a catch basin, however; so they bulldozed a hole in the earthen dam, bulldozed the banks to fill in the bottom, and landscaped the flow of water that remained to wind like an English brook and provide a domestic view for the houses which were planned."
(Edward Hoagland, "The Courage of Turtles") - "Direct objects are always noun phrases (or their equivalents, e.g., nominal clauses). The direct object of an active clause can typically become the subject of a passive clause:
Everybody hated the teacher.
(Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)
(active: the teacher is direct object)
The teacher was hated by everybody.
(passive: the teacher is subject)" - "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
(Joan Didion) - "You can't test courage cautiously."
(Annie Dillard) - "I could catch a monkey. If I was starving I could. I’d make poison darts out of the poison of the deadly frogs. One milligram of that poison can kill a monkey."
(Gareth in The Office)

