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I received a message about moving offices from a German colleague:

Das wird ca. eine Woche dauern und wir arbeiten alle von zu Hause aus.

Now, the "aus" part is confusing me.

Is the "aus" prefix coming from ausdauern = to last or from ausarbeiten = to work out

And, the other small question related to this, if I had two clauses connected by "und", each containing a separable verb, does the prefix of the separable verb move to the end of the clause or to the end of the entire sentence?

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Even if it might look like it, the aus in your example sentence is not part of a separable verb. Here, it is a preposition that means "out of" (very literal translation from English) or "from somewhere".

So,

Von diesem Turm aus kann man den ganzen Schwarzwald sehen

means

from this tower you can see all of the Black forest

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  • It's actually one of our relatively rare circumpositions (like a preposition or postposition, but in two parts): von ... aus. The von is not optional.
    – Kilian Foth
    Commented Jan 28, 2019 at 7:52
  • Ok, the "von" is not optional. Neither is the "aus"?
    – Alan Evangelista
    Commented Jun 7, 2019 at 2:50

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