Word.ws English Dictionary

brush by

brush by verb: to walk past another person, touching them slightly, normally by accident, and ignoring them.

Verb

brush by (third-person singular simple present brushes by, present participle brushing by, simple past and past participle brushed by)

  1. (idiomatic) To walk past another person, touching them slightly, normally by accident, and ignoring them.
    • The production manager brushed by me on the stairs. He seemed to be in a real hurry.

Forms of brush by

third-person singular presentbrushes by
present participlebrushing by
past participlebrushed by
pastbrushed by

Questions about brush by

What does brush by mean?
Brush by means to walk past another person, touching them slightly, normally by accident, and ignoring them.
What part of speech is brush by?
Brush by is a verb.
What is the past tense of brush by?
The past tense of brush by is brushed by.

Words near brush by in the dictionary

  1. brush border
  2. brush borders
  3. brush bow
  4. brush bows
  5. brush bronzewing
  6. brush by
  7. brush coral
  8. brush cuckoo
  9. brush cuckoos
  10. brush cut
  11. brush cuts

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brush by (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-brush by.ogg.

Cite this entry: “brush by.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brush_by. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.