belt-tighten
belt-tighten verb: to tighten one's belt.
Verb
belt-tighten (third-person singular simple present belt-tightens, present participle belt-tightening, simple past and past participle belt-tightened)
- To tighten one's belt.
- They light some kind of flame in viewers who don’t have lots of attractive relatives and would enjoy learning that love matters more than money, even if it means your kids may have to go to a state school and you may have to belt-tighten down to one house instead of two.2016 March 27, Janet Maslin, “Review: In ‘The Nest,’ a Family Pot to Split Sets Sibling Relations to a Slow Boil”, in The New York Times
Forms of belt-tighten
| third-person singular present | belt-tightens |
|---|---|
| present participle | belt-tightening |
| past participle | belt-tightened |
| past | belt-tightened |
Origin of belt-tighten
Back-formation from belt-tightening, from tighten one's belt.
Questions about belt-tighten
- What does belt-tighten mean?
- Belt-tighten means to tighten one's belt.
- What part of speech is belt-tighten?
- Belt-tighten is a verb.
- What is the past tense of belt-tighten?
- The past tense of belt-tighten is belt-tightened.
Words near belt-tighten in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: belt-tighten (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: “belt-tighten.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/belt-tighten. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.