Name: “on board”, “in charge” “at large” – English PREPOSITION COLLOCATIONS with AT, ON, IN
Uploaded: 2025-10-23T18:00:16.000Z
Duration: 10 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Welcome back to www.engvid.com. i'm Adam.

To-infinitive

In today's video, I want to give you some collocations with the prepositions in, on, and at.

Now, again, just to review, what is a collocation?

This is a commonly joined grouping of words, sometimes two words, sometimes three, that have very specific functions or meanings.

And in the case of the examples I'll show you here, most of almost all of them have an idiomatic function, meaning that the two words together mean something different than the two words separated.

And you'll understand as I get into them.

Now, the main thing I want to get across here is that in on, at is not limited to talking about time or dates, because in most English classes, when they teach you these prepositions, that's what they focus on.

But you're going to see that they have a lot of different uses.

And I also made a previous video explaining how to learn prepositions in collocations.

So let's get started with the collocations with the preposition in.

In charge, in the dark, in light of and in all likelihood.

So if any of you play poker, you know the card game where you're betting, if you think you have a very, very good hand, you're going to take all of your money and put it into the pot, you're all in.

So we also use this expression to mean fully committed to something.

So if you have a project at work or if you have your friend wants to do something, like exciting, like an adventure, and

I'm 100% committed to doing this thing or I'm going to put 100% of my efforts into that.

In charge means having control, being the authority.

So in most countries, the president or the prime minister or whoever is in charge makes the major decisions, right?

In a classroom, in theory, the teacher is in charge of the classroom.

In some places, the students are in charge, but we won't talk about that today.

So to be in charge, to be in control, authority in the dark.

If you imagine being in a dark place, you don't really know what's going on, right?

To be in the dark means to not know or Somebody's keeping a secret from you or any situation like that where you're not aware of what's going on, what people are doing, what people are thinking, etc.

Which is not related or not opposite to in the dark, in light of means knowing what we know now and then whatever the result or the next action will be.

Like for example, in legal cases, in light of the evidence we believe that this person committed murder.

So it's not like a secret here, but it's based on information that you have.

In light of this information in all likelihood basically means probably.

In all likelihood something will happen, means there's a very good chance it will happen.

All of these collocations within have nothing to do with time or date or place.

So make sure you understand them as individual vocabulary units.

That's the easiest way to think about this.

Sorry, we're going to start with on and off.

And you notice I have the hyphens because these are all working together.

So some, like my friend comes to visit me on and off whenever he's in town.

If a machine is working on and off means sometimes it just turns off, sometimes it turns on.

So the light, the lights sometimes are on and off, sometimes they're on, sometimes they're off.

So of course I am writing on the board, but that's a completely different collocation.

On board means you've joined something or you agree with something.

So we have a company meeting and I say, okay, this is what we plan to do.

And I hope all of you are on board with this plan.

I hope all of you are willing to participate and agree with this plan.

And it doesn't have to be business situations.

You're on board with anything that needs some sort of agreement or a group decision to work together and do something on behalf of.

So if I, if I decide to represent my school at a conference, I speak on behalf of my colleagues.

Instead of each teacher or each person working there saying something, one person will speak for everybody.

So one person will speak on behalf of the whole group on condition I will help you.

Or on one condition or on two conditions.

Basically on condition means there's something else that needs to be done for me to do something else, right?

So if you want me to help you study for the IELTS exam, I will do it on condition that you do your homework and do everything that I ask you to do.

If you're not going to work hard, I'm not going to help you.

sometimes I go to the store and I, you know, I'm buying my groceries, like bread and meat and vegetables and whatnot.

And sometimes I'll purchase a snack on impulse.

On impulse means without thinking about it before.

So an action taken on impulse is one that wasn't planned or thought about before.

So, for example, using less plastic helps the entire society or helps society at large generally, everybody.

Another use of this is that at large means a little bit like free.

So a prisoner escaped from jail and now he's at large.

We don't know where he is, he's free somewhere and we need to capture him.

So that's another expression, use at stake.

At stake means at risk of being lost or damaged or whatever.