From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

Definition:

The part of a sentence or clause that indicates what it is about.

Etymology:

From the Latin, "to throw."

Examples:

• "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
  (Albert Einstein)



• "This is not a book that should be tossed lightly aside. It should be hurled with great force.
  (Dorothy Parker)



• "The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away."
  (George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant")



• "Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road."
  (E.B. White, "Once More to the Lake")



• "You can't try to do things; you simply must do them."
  (Ray Bradbury)



• "Baseball is dull only to dull minds."
  (Red Barber)



• "Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason."
  (Richard Chenevix Trench)



• "To do the thing properly, with any hope of ending up with a genuine duplicate of a single person, you really have no choice. You must clone them all."
  (Lewis Thomas, "The Tucson Zoo")



• "My little brother had not eaten voluntarily in over three years."
  (Ralphie in A Christmas Story, 1983)



• "Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it, and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there."
  (Don DeLillo)



• "Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults."
  (Mitch Hedberg)



• "I am a sophisticated sex robot, sent back in time to change the future for one lucky lady."
  (Chuck Sherman in American Pie, 1999)

Pronunciation: SUB-jekt