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say it: pree-AH-kyuh-pahy
preoccupy is a verb meaning "engage or engross the interest or attention of beforehand or occupy urgently or obsessively". It carries 2 recorded senses.
engage or engross the interest or attention of beforehand or occupy urgently or obsessively
“His work preoccupies him”
“The matter preoccupies her completely--she cannot think of anything else”
occupy or take possession of beforehand or before another or appropriate for use in advance
“the army preoccupied the hills”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for preoccupy come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.