Word.ws English Dictionary

brushes off

brushes off is the third-person singular simple present indicative of brush off.

Meaning of brush off

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To disregard (something), to dismiss or ignore (someone), as unimportant.
    • Again I begged her to keep an eye on her blood pressure and not get so worked up, and once more she brushed me off, this time with a curt request that I would go and boil my head.1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter XVIII, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    shrug off
  2. (dated) To depart with a sweeping motion; to rush away.
    • Thus, ſeizing his hat, he bruſh’d off like the wind, / And the Porter and Eatables follow’d behind.1765, [Oliver] Goldsmith, The Haunch of Venison, a Poetical Epistle to Lord Clare, Dublin: […] W. Whitestone, […], published 1776, →OCLC, page 8
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see brush, off. To remove something with a brush.

Questions about brushes off

What is brushes off the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Brushes off is the third-person singular simple present indicative of brush off.

Words near brushes off in the dictionary

  1. brushes aside
  2. brushes away
  3. brushes back
  4. brushes by
  5. brushes down
  6. brushes off
  7. brushes one's teeth
  8. brushes out
  9. brushes over
  10. brushes past
  11. brushes something under the carpet

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brushes off (page history and authors); brush off (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: “brushes off.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brushes_off. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.