transcription, транскрипция: [ kʌp(ə)l ]
( couples, coupling, coupled)
Frequency: The word is one of the 1500 most common words in English.
1.
If you refer to a couple of people or things, you mean two or approximately two of them, although the exact number is not important or you are not sure of it.
Across the street from me there are a couple of police officers standing guard...
I think the trouble will clear up in a couple of days.
...a small working-class town in Massachusetts, a couple of hundred miles from New York City.
QUANT : QUANT of pl-n
•
Couple is also a determiner in spoken American English, and before ‘more’ and ‘less’.
...a couple weeks before the election...
I think I can play maybe for a couple more years.
DET
•
Couple is also a pronoun.
I’ve got a couple that don’t look too bad.
PRON
2.
A couple is two people who are married, living together, or having a sexual relationship.
The couple have no children.
...after burglars ransacked an elderly couple’s home.
N-COUNT-COLL
3.
A couple is two people that you see together on a particular occasion or that have some association.
...as the four couples began the opening dance...
N-COUNT-COLL
4.
If you say that one thing produces a particular effect when it is coupled with another, you mean that the two things combine to produce that effect.
...a problem that is coupled with lower demand for the machines themselves...
Over-use of those drugs, coupled with poor diet, leads to physical degeneration...
= combine
VERB : usu passive , be V-ed with n , V-ed
5.
If one piece of equipment is coupled to another, it is joined to it so that the two pieces of equipment work together.
Its engine is coupled to a semiautomatic gearbox...
The various systems are coupled together in complex arrays.
VERB : usu passive , be V-ed to n , be V-ed together
6.
see also coupling