- build
- build vb Build, construct, erect, frame, raise, rear are comparable when they mean to form or fashion a structure or something comparable to a structure.Build strictly implies a fitting together of parts and materials to form something which may be large (as a house, a factory, a church, or a bridge) or small (as a bird's nest, a fence, or a child's toy) but of which the forming must involve some measure or degree of complication in the bringing together of parts and materials{
build a cathedral
}{build a shack
}{the robins built their nest in the fork of a tree
}{build a battle-ship
}When used in reference to something immaterial build (often followed by up) may suggest an analogy between the immaterial thing and an edifice especially by implying an adding of part to part or bit to bit in the attainment of an end{build up a man's ego
}{built up a fortune bit by bit
}{build a theory on slight evidence
}Construct comes close to build in its implication of the putting together the material given or at hand to form something. But it is not quite equivalent, for it stresses not the labor, especially the manual labor, involved but the problem involved in the fitting together of parts. Construct therefore emphasizes the discovering by the mind of how the parts or the materials should be combined in order to gain the desired end. To build is the work of men who use their hands or by analogy their brains to bring something into being; to construct is the work of men who use their brains, though sometimes their hands in obedience to their brains, to solve the problem of how a thing should be or is built or made or brought into being; hence construct implies composition or design and may take as its object anything brought into material or immaterial existence by one or the other process{construct a plot
}{construct a dam
}{the mind of the scientist constructs its own world— Inge
}{each constructed and consolidated a realm— Belloc
}Construct is also often used as the opposite of destroy without a specific reference to these implications{it is proverbially easier to destroy than to construct— T. S. Eliot
}{roughly speaking, we construct when we increase the potential energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy when we diminish its potential energy— Russell
}Erect basically means to set upright. Although the term may carry this as its essential meaning{erect a flagpole
}{the cobra erected itself to strike
}it was early applied to high structures and has accordingly come to imply building in its most usual sense. The word is often used in place of build without any marked implication of putting together parts and materials{many huge factories erected during the war now stand idle
}but it always carries some suggestion of the sense of to set up (as by building or establishing){erect a statue to his memory
}{erect a scaffold
}{a very much denser obstruction is in the process of being erected now by literary critics— Day Lewis
}Frame approaches construct but in respect to physical structures more specifically applies to the bringing together and joining of parts (as sills, plates, and joists) that define the form of the final structure{a cottage framed of pine and sheathed with cedar
}In extended use it throws the stress upon a forming or fashioning to suit a design, an intention, a purpose, or the facts and may be applied to anything so constructed{frame an answer
}{frame a hypothesis
}{picture him excuses framing—going from her far away— Gilbert
}{all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation— John Marshall
}{it is in order to overcome these obstacles that the notes and questions in this volume have been framed— Notes and Queries on Anthropology
}{now after this he built a wall without the city . . . and raised it up a very great height—2 Chron 33:14
}{those arts which were destined to raise our Gothic cathedrals— Coulton
}{this tower; it is my own; though it was reared to Beauty— Millay
}Antonyms: unbuild, destroybuild n *physique, habit, constitution
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
