Sprayed water to / on

Hi,

Can I say,

(a) The firemen sprayed water to /on /onto the house. Not 'to'. 'On' is more common than 'onto'.

(b) The firemen sprayed water on to the house fire.

To avoid repeating the term 'fire', say something like

The firemen sprayed water on to the burning house fire.


Clive

Thanks, but I just checked the meaning of "sprayed", it means:

= to force liquid out of a container it comes out in a stream of very small drops and covers an area.

I got confused, why do we use "sprayed" if we looked at the meaning, "a very small drops of water" instead of other words? I won't believe fire can be put out with a small drops of water, right?

Hi Vincent,

It's true that 'spray' is not a great word to use here.

In natural English, you'd more often hear something like

The firemen used hoses on the burning house.

Even here, it's not completely natural, because everybody knows that that is what firemen normally do.

In my opinion, the underlying problem with many of your sentences is that

Vincent TeoI won't don't believe fire can be put out with a small drops of water, right?

But consider: Whole oceans are made up of small drops of water.

Hi Vincent,

You can also use 'hose' as a verb.

eg The firemen hosed the house.

Clive