English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I encountered a sentence in the Oxford Dictionaries' definition of dead:
‘higher up, the marble becomes of a dull, dead colour’
The phrasal verb become of doesn't make sense here. According to the dictionaries I have just checked, it is usually used with "what" and means "happen to." I thought the sentence above would work better with becomes (without of). What does become of mean here?
Higher up, the marble becomes a dull, dead colour.
This would mean that the marble transforms into a colour, which is odd.
We have three ways of describing the color of the marble:
1) The colour of the marble is dull and dead.
2) The marble is of a dull, dead colour.
3) The marble has a dull, dead colour.
We can use the word becomes in the first two structures:
1) The colour of the marble becomes dull and dead.
2) The marble becomes of a dull, dead colour.
But not in the last structure.
Thus,
1) Higher up, the color of the marble becomes dull and dead.
2) Higher up, the marble becomes of a dull, dead color.
