blame
part of speech
verb (blame, blames, blamed, blaming); noun (blame, uncountable)
meaning for a pupil
1) To blame someone means to say or think that they caused something bad. tree →
2) The blame is the responsibility for something bad that happened. tree →
3) «To be to blame» means to be the one who caused it. tree →
sense in the lessons
In stories and in lessons about friendship and honesty, blaming shows who is held responsible; blaming someone else for your own mistake is unfair and a kind of lie. In science, to find what is «to blame» for a result means to find its cause. Phrases: blame someone for something, take the blame, put the blame on, don't blame me, be to blame.
examples
- Don't blame your sister; you broke the vase. tree →
- He blamed the dog for eating his homework. tree →
- Who is to blame for this mess? tree →
- She took the blame even though it wasn't her fault. tree →
- The storm was to blame for the fallen tree. tree →
- I don't blame you for being upset. tree →
- It's not fair to blame someone without checking first. tree →
- They put the blame on the new boy. tree →
note
Pattern: blame someone FOR something («blamed him for the mess») or blame something ON someone («blamed the mess on him»). «Blame» as a noun is uncountable: no «a blame». Owning up honestly is usually better than letting someone else take the blame.
In the corpora
- When something bad happens to someone, like a burglary, blame the person who did it, not the person it happened to.
- The rabbits only blamed each other once it was too late: «How stupid you are!
- The Rat: «You know I shouldn't like you to blame me afterwards and say I had forgotten anything!»
- "A senior moment" is a joking name for a moment of forgetting, blamed on getting old.
- "Lessons have been learned" (official) means we failed and we were blamed.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «blame» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.