verb [VN]
1 to prevent sth from happening by taking action to stop it:
Her departure pre-empted any further questions. * A good training course will pre-empt many problems. * The government announced it had pre-empted a coup attempt.
2 to do or say sth before sb else does:
She was just about to apologize when he pre-empted her. * I do not want to pre-empt anything that the treasurer is going to say.
3 (AmE) to replace a planned programme on the television:
'Roseanne' will be pre-empted by a special news bulletin.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for pre-empt is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Does pre-empt appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — pre-empt appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
