What does "do-support" mean?

The use of the auxiliary verb "do" in negative or interrogative English sentences that do not contain other auxiliaries.

What is a synonym for "do-support"?

Common synonyms include: do-insertion.

Do-support

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
The use of the auxiliary verb "do" in negative or interrogative English sentences that do not contain other auxiliaries. uncountable
"As we can see, ‘do-support’ is a frequently used construction in Modern English, that has no equal construction in German. We chose the topic of ‘do-support’ for our study since “[...]^([sic]) do-support is one of the main stumbling blocks”[…]"

Synonyms

All synonyms

do-insertion

Example

More examples

"As we can see, ‘do-support’ is a frequently used construction in Modern English, that has no equal construction in German. We chose the topic of ‘do-support’ for our study since “[...]^([sic]) do-support is one of the main stumbling blocks”[…]"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.