pluck at something
pluck
noun[ U ]
 informaluk /plʌk/ us /plʌk/
courage and a strong wish to succeed: 胆识，勇气
She showed a lot of pluck in standing up to her boss.她顶撞老板，显示出了很大的勇气。

Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

bravery
braveryA policeman who chased a burglar despite a serious leg injury has received an award for bravery.
courageYou have shown great courage in coming to testify.
pluckYou have to admire his pluck.
gutsI didn't have the guts to go on my own.
valourUKThe Victoria Cross is Britain's highest military award for valour.
heroismI witnessed an example of heroism that made me proud to be British.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Bravery
audaciousness
audacity
backbone
balls
bell
bell the catidiom
courage
daring
derring-do
Dutch courage
fearlessness
grit
gut
heart
heroism
intestinal fortitude
liquid courage
nerve
swash
valiance

pluck | American Dictionary

pluck
verb
us/plʌk/

pluckverb (REMOVE)

[ T ]
to remove something, esp. with a sudden movement:
Astronauts plan to use the shuttle’s robot arm to pluck the satellite out of space.
[ T ]
If you pluck something, you remove hair or feathers from it by pulling:
She plucked her eyebrows.
I don’t think I could pluck a chicken.

pluckverb (PULL AT)

[ I/T ]
to pull at something with your fingers and then release it:
[ T ]Jenkins’s idea of swinging is plucking violins.
[ I ]fig. Her stories are designed to pluck at your heartstrings.
pluck
noun[ U ]
us/plʌk/

plucknoun[U] (BRAVERY)

bravery and a strong desire to succeed:
Her 80-plus years have not dulled her pluck.

Examples of pluck

pluck
Clonal variations in the response of black tea quality due to plucking standards.
The changes in black leaf quality due to variations of plucking standard and fermentation time.
Musical performance isn't plucked from the ether, it's worked on.
Without such support, they may be reduced to plucking 'grains from grass ', as the book's title alludes.
The work begins with cactus plucks that slowly become amplified.
Previous work has shown that predicted yields are sensitive to the harvest interval and plucking standard.
Of the remaining 20 seeds, 16 were dropped beneath the tree by birds plucking them from the pods.
The new sound material chosen by the teacher included bowed and plucked notes played on violin and cello.
A string plucked bowed and repitched using a fingerboard and 'finger'.
In this example, then, the instrument is plucked, then bowed, then plucked again - with various pitch changes during the phrase.
In the end, long sustained drones (made from single cactus plucks and scrapes) dominate the soundscape until the original source itself is no longer present.
Oxpeckers are visual predators, first plucking the engorged females, then searching large body areas and scissoring and eating the smaller tick stages.
A santouri is a hammered dulcimer; there are plucked, trapezoid zithers in the photographs.
No reason for any hypothesis requires to be cited ; hypotheses can be plucked from the air at will.
The strata attitude, joint frequency and orientation, and bed thickness of the basalts have indicated that the main erosional processes in the lava dam reach were plucking and abrasion.
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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.