take a leaf out of someone's book

leaf | American Dictionary

leaf
noun[ C ]
us/lif/pluralleavesus/livz/

leafnoun[C] (PLANT)

any of the flat, usually green parts of a plant that are joined at one end to the stem or branch:
By early November it’s getting cold and the trees are starting to lose their leaves.

leafnoun[C] (PAPER)

a thin flat substance, esp. a sheet of paper, or a layer of something:
Some of the leaves of the old book had come loose.
A leaf of a table is an extra flat piece that can be added to the top surface to make the table larger.

Examples of leaf

leaf
Many of these long leaves are preserved on the bedding planes of a siltstone.
The leaves of plants are beautifully designed to carry out photosynthesis.
They have abandoned leaves to reduce loss of water by transpiration, and their stems are swollen with stored water.
The drill was used a great deal in the leaves of the trees.
The attraction of both predators to the leaves containing pollen may be the reason for the lower levels of predation on the plants containing pollen.
The number of leaves needed on a stem from each plant species was then calculated.
Each point is the mean of measurements on leaves from the three canopy strata on four days.
A linear relationship determined from measurements on leaves in two- to six-year-old oil palm plantings served this purpose.
During submergence, the environmental conditions impose several stresses on the physiological activities of leaves.
Fresh leaves were added every two to three days.
Insects of the same age (4-5 days old) were placed on seedlings having two expanded leaves (about 18 days old).
When first instars reached terminal leaves they tended to stay for longer.
Plants were used at 4 weeks of age when they had two true sets of compound leaves.
Thus, one hypothesis is that the labor market climate in 2002 was more understanding toward taking child-care leaves.
A seedling was considered fully established when two leaves appeared in addition to the green cotyledons.
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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withleaf

leaf

These are words often used in combination with leaf.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

autumn leaf
Or are they just hoping that something may turn up; and are they being blown hither and thither like an autumnleaf?
From the
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