Word.ws English Dictionary

borne down

borne down is the past participle of bear down.

Meaning of bear down

Verb

bear down (third-person singular simple present bears down, present participle bearing down, simple past bore down, past participle borne down)

  1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see bear, down.
  2. To steer away from the wind; to approach from windward.
  3. (transitive) To push (someone) to the ground; to defeat, overcome.
  4. (obsolete, transitive) To maintain one's position against (someone) in a debate; to stand one's ground against.
    • And they sayd unto her: thou arte mad. And she bare them doune that hit was even so.1526, [William Tyndale, transl.], The Newe Testamẽt […] (Tyndale Bible), [Worms, Germany: Peter Schöffer], →OCLC, Acts
  5. (intransitive) To intensify one's efforts.
    • It's 9:41, 58 degrees, and I'm flunking out. Time to bear down.
  6. (intransitive, with-on) To approach in a determined manner.
    • Huth headed wide inside two minutes, Andy Wilkinson blasted over from Shotton's cut-back and Jones was squeezed out when bearing down on goal.2011 November 3, David Ornstein, “Macc Tel-Aviv 1 - 2 Stoke”, in BBC Sport

See all 7 meanings of bear down

Questions about borne down

What is borne down the past participle of?
Borne down is the past participle of bear down.

Words near borne down in the dictionary

  1. borne a hand
  2. borne against
  3. borne away
  4. borne away the bell
  5. borne date
  6. borne down
  7. borne down on
  8. borne fruit
  9. borne in
  10. borne in mind
  11. borne in on

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: borne down (page history and authors); bear 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.

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