play with

present singular third person plays with · participle present playing with · participle past played with · past played with

1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: play with.

   The boy was playing with his toys.

   2 more examples

   One morning I had been driven to the precarious refuge afforded by the steps of the inn, after rejecting offers from the Celebrity to join him in a variety of amusements. But even here I was not free from interruption, for he was seated on a horse-block below me, playing with a fox terrier.

   1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

   It's just as quick out of the blocks. The five-car unit has three engines, giving it 2,820hp to play with, so the once-'feared' Devon banks of Hemerdon, Rattery and Dainton are child's play to these trains.

   2025 November 12, 'Mystery Shopper', “Is Devon the cream of the crop?”, in RAIL, number 1048, page 48

2. transitiveTo fiddle with; make small adjustments to, for example to something mechanical in order to improve its performance.
3. transitiveTo trick.

   Breaking into the right side of Wolves' penalty area, he played with Elokobi over and over while ignoring both Dimitar Berbatov and Wayne Rooney as they lurked in the centre with arms aloft.

   2011 February 5, Chris Whyatt, “Wolverhampton 2-1 Man Utd”, in BBC

4. transitiveTo sexually stimulate (a person or a person's erogenous zone).

   She laughed and started to play with me. I started getting hard and really got turned on. I liked her giving me all the attention. I begged her to suck my cock. I was ready to explode. She went down on me and I had a terrific orgasm.

   1992, Patrick Suraci, Male sexual armor, page 169