| 释义 |
ˈplace-ˌholder
One who holds a place or office. †a. One who acts as deputy for another; a lieutenant, substitute, proxy. Sc. Obs.
1560in Calderwood Hist. Kirk (1843) II. 13 Committed by the place-holders of the ministrie. 1566Reg. Privy Council Scot. I. 451 His deputtis and place haldaris. c1610Sir J. Melvil Mem. (1683) 188 The Prince, who is God's place⁓holder.
b. One who holds office under the government.
1818Moore Fudge Fam. Paris ii. 105 A youth of parts, Who longs to be a small place-holder. 1848W. K. Kelly tr. L. Blanc's Hist. Ten Y. II. 238 The strength of goverment..resulted, not from its having some thousands of place-holders..at its disposal, but from the means it possessed of making its will reach everywhere.
So ˈplace-ˌholding a.
1830Ld. J. Russell Select Sp. & Desp. (1870) I. 296 That corrupt and place-holding Parliament.
Add: Also placeholder. 2. a. Math. (a) A significant zero in the decimal representation of a number. (b) In the teaching of mathematics, a symbol (freq. an empty box) used in an expression to denote a missing quantity or operator.
1950M. A. Potter et al. Math. to Use iv. 205 Sometimes you have to annex zeros at the right of the product to act as place-holders. 1952L. J. Brueckne et al. Understanding Numbers i. 3 The Romans did not have a place holder like our zero. 1966Ogilvy & Anderson Excurs. Number Theory i. 2 Note the importance of zero as a spacer, or place-holder; 307 is not the same as 37, although 3x2 + 0 + 7 is the same as 3x2 + 7 . Here something else is acting as the place-indicator. 1966May & Moss New Math for Adults Only iii. 17/1 The youngster is writing a mathematical sentence with any closed figure,..as a placeholder for the unknown or unknowns.
b. Linguistics. An element of a sentence that is required by syntactic constraints but carries little or no semantic information; spec. the impersonal pronoun in sentences where the subject clause has been placed after the verb.
1968R. W. Langacker Lang. & its Struct. v. 129 One such rule is Extraposition, which moves the embedded clause to the end of the sentence and leaves behind, as a placeholder in subject position, the semantically empty form it. 1984Fremdsprachen XXVIII. 241 English syntax permits ‘it’, too, as a non-referring subject in certain structures (‘It is cold’) and as a place-holder in others (‘It does not bother me that he is ill’). 1985Ibid. XXIX. 239 Other translations are, of course, possible, e.g. with the German placeholder ‘es’ or the use of the indefinite pronoun ‘man’. |