Meaning & use
apprehend
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Meanings
verbtransitivelegal
To seize a suspected criminal and take them into police custody.
Grammar: Always takes an object: officers apprehended the suspect.
Patterns
- apprehend someone
- apprehend someone for something
Police apprehended the burglar two blocks from the house.
The guard apprehended a man who was trying to climb the fence.
Officers were able to apprehend both suspects without any trouble.
verbtransitiveformal
To grasp the meaning or importance of something with your mind.
Grammar: Takes an object, often an abstract idea: apprehend the danger.
Patterns
- apprehend something
- apprehend that something is true
It took the students a while to apprehend how serious the situation was.
She could not fully apprehend the scale of the universe.
Few people apprehend the risks until it is too late.
Word forms
| third person singular | apprehends |
|---|---|
| past tense | apprehended |
| past participle | apprehended |
| -ing form | apprehending |
Common combinations
- apprehend a suspect
- Detectives hope to apprehend the suspect by tonight.
- apprehend a fugitive
- Border agents apprehended the fugitive at the airport.
- apprehend the offender
- Cameras helped the police apprehend the offender quickly.
- fail to apprehend
- They failed to apprehend the thief before he left the city.
- apprehend the significance
- He did not apprehend the significance of the warning.
Synonyms and how they differ
- arrest
- Arrest is the plain, everyday word for taking someone into custody, while apprehend sounds more formal and stresses the act of catching.
- capture
- Capture works for catching people, animals or places, and often suggests a chase or fight that apprehend does not.
- detain
- Detain means to hold someone for a time, perhaps for questioning, and does not necessarily mean a formal arrest.
- grasp
- For the mental sense, grasp is more natural and informal than apprehend, which sounds literary.
Opposites
Word family
- apprehension noun
- the act of arresting someone, or a feeling of worry about the future
- apprehensive adjective
- anxious about something that may happen
- apprehensively adverb
- in an anxious or fearful way
- apprehensible adjective
- able to be understood
Commonly confused: apprehend or comprehend? apprehend or apprise?
apprehend vs comprehend
Comprehend only means to understand, so it matches the mental sense of apprehend but cannot mean to arrest someone.
apprehend vs apprise
Apprise means to inform someone of something, as in apprise her of the situation; it has nothing to do with arrest or understanding.
Practice
Choose the best word: 'Police were able to ___ the man who had robbed the store.'
Choose one answer.
Apprehend means to catch and arrest a suspect. Comprehend means to understand, and apprise means to inform, so neither fits an arrest.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “apprehend”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.