- 1欠人情、受惠於（覺得該報答，或不能違背對方）
If you are beholden to someone, you feel you owe them something because they helped you. It is not only about money. They did you a kindness — a favour, a job, a rescue — and now you feel you should not go against them, or you should help them back. It is a little formal, and it can sound careful or even , as if you do not like being in that position. You say beholden to a person, not beholden for a person. Though actually, the word began as the old past form of behold, ‘to look at’, which does not mean ‘to bind’ or ‘to make someone owe you’ at all. The meaning drifted a long time ago, and English kept the old shape with a new job.
組成The old past form of behold (Middle English biholden). The verb behold means to look, not to put someone in your debt — so the ‘owing’ sense is a later drift, not a meaning you can read off the pieces today.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
beholdenadj/bɪˈhəʊldən/
- 1
Obligated to provide, display, or do something for another; indebted, obliged for a bounden duty.
- From an early age, I had decided I wanted to be beholden to no one.
- But musical ancestry aside, the influence to which [Justin] Bieber is most beholden is the current trends in pop music, which means Believe is loaded up with EDM accouterments, seeking a comfortable middle ground where Bieber’s impressively refined pop-R&B croon can rub up on techno blasts and garish dubstep drops (and occasionally grind on some AutoTune, not necessarily because it needs it, but because a certain amount of robo-voice is expected these days).
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。