direct object

A noun or pronoun in a sentence that receives the action of a transitive verb.

See also:

• Practice in Identifying Direct Objects
• Indirect Object
• Object

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.
  (active: the teacher is direct object)
  
  The teacher was hated by everybody.
  (passive: the teacher is subject)"

  (Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)



• "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)