Word.ws English Dictionary

bushwhack

bushwhack verb: to travel through thick wooded country, cutting away scrub to make progress.

Verb

bushwhack (third-person singular simple present bushwhacks, present participle bushwhacking, simple past and past participle bushwhacked)

  1. To travel through thick wooded country, cutting away scrub to make progress.
    • For hours we bushwhack through a study section of Jatun Sacha in search of Minquartia, sliding down muddy draws.1990 August, Boyd Gibbons, “Missouri's Garden of Consequence”, in National Geographic, volume 178, number 2, page 131
  2. To fight, as a guerrilla, especially in wooded country.
  3. To ambush.

Forms of bushwhack

third-person singular presentbushwhacks
present participlebushwhacking
past participlebushwhacked
pastbushwhacked

Origin of bushwhack

From bush + whack.

Questions about bushwhack

What does bushwhack mean?
Bushwhack means to travel through thick wooded country, cutting away scrub to make progress.
What part of speech is bushwhack?
Bushwhack is a verb.
What is the past tense of bushwhack?
The past tense of bushwhack is bushwhacked.

Words near bushwhack in the dictionary

  1. bushwalking
  2. bushwalks
  3. Bushway
  4. Bushways
  5. bushweed
  6. bushwhack
  7. bushwhacked
  8. bushwhacker
  9. bushwhackers
  10. bushwhacking
  11. bushwhackings

Source and license

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