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pry
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pry
verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
off
▪ He pried off his shoes; loosened his collar; slumped in his seat like an opium smoker.
■ VERB
want
▪ Was that why you wanted to pry into my private life?
▪ He had had enough experience of strangers probing his own hurts without wanting to pry into those of others.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Anna is a private person, and I did not want to pry.
▪ Employers shouldn't try to pry into what a person does in the privacy of their own home.
▪ My son hasn't given us a reason for his divorce, and we don't want to pry.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But those glimmering eyes can also be prying, even sinister.
▪ Collymore heaved himself into the boat and slapped the boy until his senses returned, prying the club from his mortal grip.
▪ Her head throbbed, but she ignored it as she probed and pried.
▪ I didn't mean to pry.
▪ Maury Maverick managed to pry out of the Pentagon the religious affiliations of the 220 who died that day in Beirut.
▪ Now, say two physicists at Johns Hopkins University, the secret behind this sticky mystery has been pried loose.
▪ That is their secret, and will remain so; it behoves us not to pry, only to speculate in passing.
▪ The picture had been pried from each one.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pry

Pry \Pry\, v. i. [OE. prien. Cf. Peer to peep.] To peep narrowly; to gaze; to inspect closely; to attempt to discover something by a scrutinizing curiosity; -- often implying reproach. `` To pry upon the stars.''
--Chaucer.

Watch thou and wake when others be asleep, To pry into the secrets of the state.
--Shak.

Pry

Pry \Pry\, n. Curious inspection; impertinent peeping.

Pry

Pry \Pry\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Pried; p. pr. & vb. n. Prying.] To raise or move, or attempt to raise or move, with a pry or lever; to prize. [Local, U. S. & Eng.]

Pry

Pry \Pry\, n. [Corrupted fr. prize a lever. See Prize, n.] A lever; also, leverage. [Local, U. S. & Eng.]

Pry pole, the pole which forms the prop of a hoisting gin, and stands facing the windlass.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
pry

"look inquisitively," c.1300, from prien "to peer in," of unknown origin, perhaps related to late Old English bepriwan "to wink." Related: Pried; prying. As a noun, "act of prying," from 1750; meaning "inquisitive person" is from 1845.

pry

"raise by force," 1823, from a noun meaning "instrument for prying, crowbar;" alteration of prize (as though it were a plural) in obsolete sense of "lever" (c.1300), from Old French prise "a taking hold, grasp" (see prize (n.2)).

Wiktionary
pry

Etymology 1 n. 1 The act of prying 2 An excessively inquisitive person vb. 1 To look where one is not welcome; to be nosey. 2 To look closely and curiously at. Etymology 2

n. 1 A lever. 2 leverage. vb. To use leverage to open or widen. (See also prise and prize.)

WordNet
pry
  1. n. a heavy iron lever with one end forged into a wedge [syn: crowbar, wrecking bar, pry bar]

  2. v. to move or force, especially in an effort to get something open; "The burglar jimmied the lock", "Raccoons managed to pry the lid off the garbage pail" [syn: prise, prize, lever, jimmy]

  3. be nosey; "Don't pry into my personal matters!"

  4. search or inquire in a meddlesome way; "This guy is always nosing around the office" [syn: nose, poke]

  5. make an uninvited or presumptuous inquiry; "They pried the information out of him" [syn: prise]

  6. [also: pried]

Wikipedia
PRY

PRY may refer to:

  • Paraguay
  • Perry Barr railway station, England; National Rail station code PRY
  • The IATA code for Wonderboom Airport in Pretoria, South Africa
  • Pry (Better Interactive Ruby Shell) - Read, Evaluate, and Print Ruby code (better than irb)
Pry (software)

Pry is an interactive shell for the Ruby programming language. It is notable for its Smalltalk-inspired ability to start a REPL within a running program. This lets programmers debug and modify the current state of a system.

Pry

Pry can refer to:

  • Pry (software)
  • Polly Pry
  • Paul Pry (play)

Usage examples of "pry".

Glumly he dug the large bottle out of his pocket, pried off the lid, and poured a fistful of antacid tablets into his palm.

In each I could hear the arthritic creaking of the attic rafters as the wind pushed at the gables and pounded on the roof and pried at the eaves.

But hee returning against them with furious force, pryed with his eyes, on whom hee might first assayle with his tuskes : Lepolemus strooke the beast first on the backe with his hunting staffe.

He bagged some urchins and sea cucumbers, but the crabs were elusive, and when he swam along the edge of the bay with his knife unsheathed to pry off the purple scallops, fierce currents threatened to drag him against the rocks.

No pressure of the Bene Gesserit, no trickery or artifice could pry them completely free from Arrakis: the spice was addictive.

Deevee tried to pry himself loose as the blob began to creep up his silver legs.

William Pry and Violet Seymour, creatures of habit, had joined in the seething game of the spectators, unable to resist the overwhelming desire to gaze upon themselves entering, as bride and bridegroom, the rose-decked church.

So they tended to do their most interesting things away from the house, and Dor had learned not to pry.

Twice when the dustman is called in to carry off a cartload of old paper, ashes, and broken bottles, the whole court assembles and pries into the baskets as they come forth.

Lilith gasped as he pried her thighs apart and pressed his hard, engorged flesh into her again.

Deathstalker reached out with one feeder hand and pried open the covering of one optic organ.

I rummaged and rooted and pried, feeling as Flinders Petrie may have felt when he thrust his first torch into his first Egyptian burial chamber.

Tangled in it like a thrashing wild animal, he was pinned face down in the sand, and the gladius was pried from his hand.

The pains were an hour apart to begin with, then every fifteen minutes or so and every ten and so forth until at last it was just one long unbearable century or so of anguish while the thing that seemed to fill me from gullet to goolies, a thing with sharp hooves and needles like a porcupine, was being pried out by some invisible force using a battering ram and a fireplace poker.

A Centaurian navigator had gazed at this screen, running from his own devils, unsuccessfully, for the ship from which Guz had personally pried the unit had been a casualty.