Example sentences of "[was/were] [verb] away at the " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | The steps were worn away at the centre , and Grainne wondered if it was from the footsteps which passed this way every night , or whether it was simply from age . |
| 2 | Meanwhile , however , the rich followed their king 's dictum ‘ Après moi , le déluge ’ , and gave themselves up to pleasure — balls , the opera ( where new works by Gluck , Grétry and Piccinni were finally displacing the heroic works of Lully and Rameau , beloved of the Ancien Régime ) , gambling and hunting ; the chattering middle classes were busy discussing politics and aesthetics ; writers such as Voltaire and Diderot were chipping away at the foundations of society with their radical ideas of universal fraternity in this ‘ Age of Enlightenment ’ ; and the poor were being told to ‘ eat cake ’ , if they had no bread . |
| 3 | These carvings have been off display for many years as it was discovered that atmospheric pollution , even within the museum , was eating away at the stone . |
| 4 | The pattern for these accusations had been set by the young Liberal Charles Masterman in The Heart of the Empire ( 1902 ) where he had thundered out his warning of inevitable decline as the result of the ‘ perpetual lowering in the vitality of the Imperial Race in the great cities of the Kingdom through over-crowding in room and in area ’ : What was never entirely clear was whether it was merely a physical deterioration that was eating away at the ‘ Imperial Race ’ , or if a moral decay was not also in evidence . |
| 5 | I was on my own now , faced with that half-obliterated turn at the V-point of the side gorge where water pouring over the track was eating away at the surface . |
| 6 | Bill was snoring away at the bar . |
| 7 | The gillie , blind as a bat , was bashing away at the fish 's tail . |
| 8 | Invited by Hawke Systems Ltd , Slough , Berkshire , to cast a glance over DEC 's Alpha boxes last week , Unigram.X was turned away at the door when DEC UK officials turned white at the mention of press . |
| 9 | Ken Connelly , 52 , who suffers from an aorta aneurysm , a problem with his main artery , was about to be operated on when he was turned away at the last minute — on two occasions . |
| 10 | Kallicharran took nearly two and a half hours over 34 , while Fredericks was grafting away at the other end . |
| 11 | Harry watched him fall back and noted that a considerable quantity of blood was coming away at the mouth . |
| 12 | And in fact it shows a lot for human nature because he was chuckling away at the end of it all and he even gave the lads who did the job a tip . |