Word.ws English Dictionary

answer the call of nature

answer the call of nature verb: to satisfy a bodily urge to urinate or defecate.

Verb

answer the call of nature (third-person singular simple present answers the call of nature, present participle answering the call of nature, simple past and past participle answered the call of nature)

  1. (euphemistic, idiomatic) To satisfy a bodily urge to urinate or defecate.
    • Che [Guevara] jumped from his seat and rushed from the room, pursued by the entire press corps. Down the hall he went, and into the men's room where, surrounded by reporters, he proceeded to answer the call of nature, shouting: "Liberdad!"1978 April 18, Charles Lynch, “Trudeau struts and frets”, in Ottawa Citizen, Canada, retrieved 03 Sep 2010, page 7
    • Unfortunately mountain climbers, like everybody else, need to answer the call of nature, and there are few toilet facilities on mountains.2007 July 24, “Europe's Highest Toilets Installed on Mont Blanc”, in Spiegel Online International, retrieved 03 Sep 2010

Forms of answer the call of nature

third-person singular presentanswers the call of nature
present participleanswering the call of nature
past participleanswered the call of nature
pastanswered the call of nature

Origin of answer the call of nature

From answer the call + call of nature in reference to a need to urinate or defecate.

Questions about answer the call of nature

What does answer the call of nature mean?
Answer the call of nature means to satisfy a bodily urge to urinate or defecate.
What part of speech is answer the call of nature?
Answer the call of nature is a verb.
What is the past tense of answer the call of nature?
The past tense of answer the call of nature is answered the call of nature.

Words near answer the call of nature in the dictionary

  1. answer sheets
  2. answer someone's prayers
  3. answer song
  4. answer songs
  5. answer the call
  6. answer the call of nature
  7. answer the helm
  8. answer to
  9. answer to someone's prayers
  10. answer up
  11. answer'd

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: answer the call of nature (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-answer the call of nature.wav.

Cite this entry: “answer the call of nature.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/answer_the_call_of_nature. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.