Word.ws English Dictionary

bar out

bar out verb: to keep (someone or something) from entering.

Verb

bar out (third-person singular simple present bars out, present participle barring out, simple past and past participle barred out)

  1. (literally, transitive) To keep (someone or something) from entering.
  2. (obsolete) To shut a teacher out of the classroom as a prank.
    • Not schoolboys at a barring out
      Rais’d ever such incessant rout1728, The Journal of a Modern Lady, Jonathan Swift
    • We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like Tennyson, when he talks of the French revolutions, the huge crusades that had recreated the whole of his civilisation, as being "no graver than a schoolboy's barring out."1913, G. K. Chesterton, “chapter 3”, in The Victorian Age in Literature
    Synonyms:
    outbar

Synonyms of bar out

Forms of bar out

third-person singular presentbars out
present participlebarring out
past participlebarred out
pastbarred out

Questions about bar out

What does bar out mean?
Bar out means to keep (someone or something) from entering.
What part of speech is bar out?
Bar out is a verb.
What is the past tense of bar out?
The past tense of bar out is barred out.

Words near bar out in the dictionary

  1. bar moneys
  2. bar monies
  3. bar none
  4. bar of chocolate
  5. bar off
  6. bar out
  7. bar pad
  8. bar pads
  9. bar parlour
  10. bar parlours
  11. bar phone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bar out (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.

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Cite this entry: “bar out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bar_out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.