"fan the flames" meaning in English

See fan the flames in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Audio: en-au-fan the flames.ogg [Australia] Forms: fans the flames [present, singular, third-person], fanning the flames [participle, present], fanned the flames [participle, past], fanned the flames [past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|*}} fan the flames (third-person singular simple present fans the flames, present participle fanning the flames, simple past and past participle fanned the flames)
  1. (idiomatic) To intensify or worsen an already difficult situation. Tags: idiomatic

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for fan the flames meaning in English (3.5kB)

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      "form": "fans the flames",
      "tags": [
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    {
      "form": "fanning the flames",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "present"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "fanned the flames",
      "tags": [
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        "past"
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    },
    {
      "form": "fanned the flames",
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          "ref": "2002, Scott Hunt, The Future of Peace: On the Front Lines with the World's Great Peacemakers, HarperCollins, published 2004, page 207",
          "text": "In simple terms, both superpowers poured gasoline on the fire and fanned the flames, hoping that out of the ashes would arise a region committed either to democracy or to Soviet-style communism.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007, Barbara Cartland, A Dream Come True, M-Y Books Distribution, published 2007",
          "text": "Far from putting a distance between them, his absence was only fanning the flames of her affection.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2010, Calvin F. Exoo, The Pen and the Sword: Press, War, and Terror in the 21st Century, SAGE Publications, Inc., published 2010, page 40",
          "text": "They worried, too, that such a war would only fan the flames of the Islamic world's animosity toward the United States, producing \"a further cycle of terrorist attacks, American casualties and escalation\" […]",
          "type": "quotation"
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          "ref": "2012, Sarah Boslaugh, “Atlanta, Georgia”, in Wilbur R. Miller, editor, The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia, Sage Publications, Inc., page 74",
          "text": "Atlanta newspapers fanned the flames of racial hatred by carrying stories of lynchings and calling for a renewed Ku Klux Klan to “control” blacks.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2012, Steve Faktor, Econovation: The Red, White, and Blue Pill for Arousing Innovation, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., published 2012",
          "text": "What I don't see happening is the government fanning the flames of competition.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        "To intensify or worsen an already difficult situation."
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      "id": "en-fan_the_flames-en-verb-idga1QF5",
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        "(idiomatic) To intensify or worsen an already difficult situation."
      ],
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      "form": "fanned the flames",
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          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007, Barbara Cartland, A Dream Come True, M-Y Books Distribution, published 2007",
          "text": "Far from putting a distance between them, his absence was only fanning the flames of her affection.",
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          "type": "quotation"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). 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.