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The red guy is looking at the blue guy.

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Case one: The red guy violently dashes forward and collides with the blue guy.

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The blue guy says:

He collided with me!

Case two: The red guy steps forward, and almost collides, but doesn't.

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The blue guy says:

He ??? with me!

The most obvious replacement would be almost collided, but I am looking for a one-word solution. Is there a word that means "almost collide" that would fit in this context?

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  • I looked up near miss in the thesaurus and these are no one-word results. Also, even the two word results don't fit your example sentence, i.e. "He close shaved me" doesn't work grammatically. I doubt there is a one-word answer, but like Bigfoot, you can't prove a negative.
    – cobaltduck
    Jan 4, 2016 at 20:20
  • If there was some contact, you might use clip, which (like graze) would indicate that it wasn't actually a collision, just a glancing blow.
    – raisinghellyer
    Jan 4, 2016 at 20:35
  • Near-missed is used as a verb quite a lot if you check Google Books.
    – ermanen
    Jan 4, 2016 at 21:43
  • Near misses (or avoidances) happen if red whizzes by blue and continues on. What OP described is pulling up short.
    – Tom Hundt
    Oct 24, 2019 at 22:49

3 Answers 3

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"The red guy approached me." (No contact/motive unclear)

"The red guy engaged me." (No contact/menacing implied)

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Graze

ɡreɪz/

verb

touch or scrape lightly in passing. "his hands just grazed hers" synonyms: touch, touch lightly, brush, brush against, rub lightly, shave, skim, kiss, caress, sweep, scrape, glance off, clip "his shot grazed the far post"

Near miss

noun

  1. a narrowly avoided collision or other accident.

"she had a near miss when her horse was nearly sucked into a dyke" synonyms: close thing, near thing, narrow escape, close call, nasty moment;

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You could say brush past:-

to push quickly past someone or something. She brushed by the little group of people standing there talking. I brushed by the plant, knocking it over.

Then your sentence would read "He brushed past me".

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    I agree that this seems relevant. However, it isn't a single word. (I'm not trying to criticize the post, just to explain why I'm not voting for it even though the meaning seems to fit pretty well.)
    – herisson
    Jan 4, 2016 at 21:30

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