Word.ws English Dictionary

bench press

/ˈbɛntʃˌpɹɛs/

bench press noun: an exercise performed by pressing the weight of a barbell away from one's body while lying on a bench.

bench press: an exercise performed by pressing the weight of a barbell away from one's body while lying on a...
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Noun

bench press (plural bench presses)

  1. An exercise performed by pressing the weight of a barbell away from one's body while lying on a bench.
    • ...Nubret has pushed and pulled maniacally at iron while sustaining a diet that would explode an ordinary metabolism—doing for that renowned chest, for instance, forty sets of twenty benchpresses (pushing 210 pounds off his chest a total of eight hundred times every other day)[…]1974, Charles Gaines, George Butler, Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding, page 18

Verb

bench press (third-person singular simple present bench presses, present participle bench pressing, simple past and past participle bench pressed)

  1. To press the weight of a barbell away from one's body while lying on a bench.
    • I went home and bench pressed 30 pounds more than I had ever done before.1988, Frederick C. Hatfield, “Powersource: Ties that bind”, in Ironman, 47 (6): 21
    • And I’m definitely getting stronger. I can now bench press — oh — at least 10 kilos without my arms collapsing underneath me.2017 November 16, Jo Ellison, “Help: the gym has turned us into slobs”, in Financial Times
    Synonyms:
    bench

Synonyms of bench press

Forms of bench press

Noun
pluralbench presses
alternative formbenchpress
Verb
third-person singular presentbench presses
present participlebench pressing
past participlebench pressed
pastbench pressed

Words formed from bench press

Questions about bench press

What does bench press mean?
Bench press means an exercise performed by pressing the weight of a barbell away from one's body while lying on a bench.
What part of speech is bench press?
Bench press can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce bench press?
Bench press is pronounced /ˈbɛntʃˌpɹɛs/.
What is the plural of bench press?
The plural of bench press is bench presses.

Words near bench press in the dictionary

  1. bench jockey
  2. bench jockeys
  3. bench mark
  4. bench memo
  5. bench memos
  6. bench press
  7. bench pressed
  8. bench presses
  9. bench pressing
  10. bench pull
  11. bench pulls

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bench press (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:

Cite this entry: “bench press.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bench_press. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.