Word.ws English Dictionary

bog down

bog down verb: to become stuck (as if in a bog) and unable to progress.

Verb

bog down (third-person singular simple present bogs down, present participle bogging down, simple past and past participle bogged down)

  1. (intransitive, "get"-passive) To become stuck (as if in a bog) and unable to progress.
    • We've gotten bogged down in trifling details.
    • The play bogs down in narrative as we watch Max and Rudy flee Berlin.1979 December 22, Andy Beck, “BENT: To Remind, To Instruct, To Warn”, in Gay Community News, volume 2, number 22, page 11
  2. (transitive) To cause to become stuck and unable to progress.
    Synonyms:
    mire, hamper, stymie

Synonyms of bog down

Forms of bog down

third-person singular presentbogs down
present participlebogging down
past participlebogged down
pastbogged down

Questions about bog down

What does bog down mean?
Bog down means to become stuck (as if in a bog) and unable to progress.
What part of speech is bog down?
Bog down is a verb.
What is the past tense of bog down?
The past tense of bog down is bogged down.

Words near bog down in the dictionary

  1. bog chisels
  2. bog clubmoss
  3. bog clubmosses
  4. bog cotton
  5. bog deal
  6. bog down
  7. bog earth
  8. bog gas
  9. bog hole
  10. bog holes
  11. bog in

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bog down (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: “bog down.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bog_down. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.