drive home

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

drive home (third-person singular simple present drives home, present participle driving home, simple past drove home, past participle driven home)

1. (transitive) To push something into position completely by force.
   • 1969, James Plunkett, Strumpet City, page 396:

     He grunted as he drove each nail home.

   • 1996, Harry Harrison, One King's Way, page 186:

     Karli shook himself, drove home the last nail with a flat stone, straightened up.

   • 2004, Judith Tarr, Queen of the Amazons, page 293:

     Just as Ione began to slow, she struck Ione's sword aside and drove her own blade home.

2. (figurative, transitive) To emphasize (a point) with tangible or powerful demonstration.
   • 1905, Edith Wharton, chapter 14, in The House of Mirth, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC:

     She had dropped sideways in Gerty's big arm-chair, her head buried where lately Selden's had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to Gerty's aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat.

   • 1919 October 20, Virginia Woolf, chapter XXII, in Night and Day, London: Duckworth and Company […], →OCLC:

     Anything, she thought, was better than bickering or the strange silence which drove home to her the distance between them.

   • 2021 June 14, Mark Landler, “Boris Johnson’s ‘Global Britain’ Makes Shaky Start at G7 Summit”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     The urgent need for vaccines was driven home by the expected postponement on Monday of Britain’s plan to reopen, caused by the spread of a variant known as Delta among the unvaccinated population.

3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see drive,‎ home.

   He decided not to drive home right away.

   He was afraid he would doze off on the long drive home.

• hammer home
• ram home