See on the defensive on Wiktionary
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{
"ref": "1982 December 11, Frances Russell, “Economic performance buoys Pawley’s position”, in The Vancouver Sun (The Weekend Sun), Vancouver, BC, page A6:",
"text": "Last year, despite winning 34 of the legislature’s 57 seats with 47 per cent of the popular vote, the NDP was on the defensive almost from the start.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
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{
"ref": "2017 November 14, Phil McNulty, “England 0-0 Brazil”, in BBC News:",
"text": "Brazil's greater quality and assurance in possession meant England spent much of the game on the defensive.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"defending; playing a defensive game"
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"(sports) defending; playing a defensive game"
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"word": "initiative"
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{
"_dis1": "17 83",
"word": "tempo"
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"word": "one step ahead"
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],
"word": "on the defensive"
}
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"word": "on the attack"
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"word": "on the defensive"
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Download raw JSONL data for on the defensive meaning in All languages combined (1.8kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-23 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-20 using wiktextract (0c0c1f1 and 4230888). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.