Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Interest, support, or benefit.
- idiom (on/in) As the agent of; on the part of.
- idiom (on/in) For the benefit of; in the interest of.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Advantage, benefit, interest, or defense (of somebody or something).
- noun Affair; cause; matter.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Advantage; favor; stead; benefit; interest; profit; support; defense; vindication.
- noun in the interest of.
- noun on account of; on the part of.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Advantage; favor; stead; benefit; interest; profit; support; defense; vindication.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun as the agent of or on someone's part (usually expressed as
- noun for someone's benefit (usually expressed as `in behalf' rather than `on behalf' and usually with a possessive)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
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Examples
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The manifestation of love God makes in our behalf is a communication of the love that He Himself is.
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The interested party or another person in his behalf is entitled to seek these remedies.
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How a huge military establishment, prepped for offensive war in behalf of Marxism-Leninism, disintegrated in just a few years.
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How a huge military establishment, prepped for offensive war in behalf of Marxism-Leninism, disintegrated in just a few years.
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How a huge military establishment, prepped for offensive war in behalf of Marxism-Leninism, disintegrated in just a few years.
Time for Her to Go 2009
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I picked the easiest and most obvious evidence in behalf of ID for that illustration.
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We are the ones who are muddling through and getting crapped on by the media all the time and harped to raise our kids right and blamed if they don't turn out to be perfect little citizens, so yes, a little push back on our behalf is welcome.
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Increase the number of conservatives who actively participate, through contributions and personal activism, in behalf of conservative candidates in Republican nomination contests.
Conservative Republican Participation - Morton_C_Blackwell’s blog - RedState 2009
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I picked the easiest and most obvious evidence in behalf of ID for that illustration.
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She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed in behalf of the NAACP, SNCC and the National Council of Negro Women.
Lena Horne Passes « 2010
qroqqa commented on the word behalf
Central industrial property offices of those Member States which have decided accordingly draw up simultaneously and on their own behalves, search reports relating to earlier national trade marks in their registers.
—OHIM website on Community trade marks
A rare instance of the plural. Examination of the 48 000 ghits for this shows that about half of them are genuine uses of it; but "on their behalves" has only a fraction of 1% of the frequency of "on their behalf".
September 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word behalf
Another disfavoured construction is 'on the behalf of'. The initial half million hits on Google looks numerous (to the dubious extent that numbers mean anything on Google any more), but there are a hundred million for 'on behalf of'. Likewise, BNC has 4 against 2717. So while it's probably not to be considered entirely ungrammatical, it's not standard.
March 19, 2009