Example sentences of "they [vb past] [be] [v-ing] for " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Nobody left the queue : they were n't going to lose their place , they 'd been queueing for an hour . |
| 2 | It ran beside a broad , shaded boulevard of feathery pepper trees , and the sudden sight of European-style buildings made him reflect that the jungles , fields and villages through which they 'd been moving for the past few hours had remained unchanging throughout many centuries . |
| 3 | They 'd been heading for a festival in Chipping Sodbury , but had been diverted by police . |
| 4 | That 's what they 'd been fighting for for twenty years . |
| 5 | They 'd been waiting for me , it seemed , in a mutual absence of civility . |
| 6 | The fog lifted and the house became filled with a babble of excitable people , few of whom spoke English and who all arrived at once because they 'd been waiting for a clear passage . |
| 7 | They 'd been waiting for a council house for 5 years . |
| 8 | Bernard and Laura escaped on to their sailing boat for much of the summer , a yacht they had been enjoying for some years now , and they pottered around Mykonos in Greece . |
| 9 | By the time Iran had attacked a Kuwaiti , a Saudi and then a Liberian tanker ( the last of these caught near the principal Saudi terminal at Ras Tanura ) , the GCC states had begun to recognize this sequence — as it was doubtless intended — as a signal to distance themselves from Iraq in the light of the support they had been providing for Baghdad . |
| 10 | To judge by the clutter of bottles , glasses , and over-filled ashtrays , and the brooding , weary faces , they had been debating for many hours . |
| 11 | Fifty miles south-west of the railway line bomb , 13 Platoon of 6 UDR reported in for duty at 0600 ; they had been hoping for a quiet day , in order to catch up on some training . |
| 12 | Culdub Oakapple opened his mouth to say that acclaim was all very well in its way , but they had been hoping for something a bit more financial than that , but the two Gnomes on each side of him trod on his foot to stop him , because you could not always trust the Oakapple to be tactful . |
| 13 | They had been drinking for the best part of an hour but none were drunk . |
| 14 | They had been flying for 16 hours 12 minutes , had survived two bad storms and had flown over 1,800 miles of ocean . |
| 15 | They may not have found quite the soulmate in each other that they had been looking for , but their relationship has made up for it in other ways . |
| 16 | By searching for flashes repeating at exactly the same rate as the radio pulses , they were able to investigate much fainter pulsations than if they had been looking for pulses occurring at an unknown rate . |
| 17 | You may lose some credibility with the clientele if you demolish him or her with a blitzkrieg attack only to find later that they had been looking for the nearest toilet ! |
| 18 | He realised they had been watching for some minutes before he noticed them . |
| 19 | The broad effect of the Act was to enable societies to offer the extended range of services they had been lobbying for . |
| 20 | They first told police they had been hunting for foxes . |
| 21 | MIT members were shown , in detail , the market which they had been trying for years to service . |
| 22 | THEY had been nit-picking for weeks . |
| 23 | A judge told William Sim and David Todd that they had been playing for high stakes and had to pay the penalty . |
| 24 | Other European countries said that the new British Government would be positive and co-operative and would put forward proposals for bringing about the completion of the European Community , for which they had been working for the past 40 years . |
| 25 | They had been preparing for a raid themselves the next day ; a big raid ; five galleys of men , gathered in Arivegaig ready to board the ships in the dawn . |
| 26 | ‘ I do n't know what he meant , ’ Allen said after they had been walking for some time on the soft turf at the verge of the track . |
| 27 | They had been walking for less than ten minutes when it began to spit . |
| 28 | Gloucestershire clothiers in 1756 " laid the chain four or five yards longer on the bar " and stopped altogether an allowance of two shillings the price which they had been paying for " stopping " ( repairing ) the cloth . |
| 29 | They had been waiting for them , forewarned , rifles at the ready . |
| 30 | For her parents Fran and Les , it was the day they had been waiting for . |