Word.ws English Dictionary

call down

call down verb: to lower (a price, value) by official proclamation.

Verb

call down (third-person singular simple present calls down, present participle calling down, simple past and past participle called down)

  1. (historical) To lower (a price, value) by official proclamation.
  2. (transitive) To bring (punishment, condemnation etc.) upon someone, as from above.
    • I shall call down God's wrath upon you!
  3. (obsolete, transitive) To call for (a speaker) to stop speaking and sit down.
  4. (Canada, US, colloquial, transitive) To reprimand or insult (someone) severely.
    • He will call down his secretary if the latter's trousers are not well creased or his shoes not polished to a sparkle.1946, A. A. Brill, Lectures on Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, Alfred Knopf, page 211

Forms of call down

third-person singular presentcalls down
present participlecalling down
past participlecalled down
pastcalled down

Questions about call down

What does call down mean?
Call down means to lower (a price, value) by official proclamation.
What part of speech is call down?
Call down is a verb.
What is the past tense of call down?
The past tense of call down is called down.

Words near call down in the dictionary

  1. call collect
  2. call date
  3. call dates
  4. call delay
  5. call delays
  6. call down
  7. call drink
  8. call drinks
  9. call for
  10. call for help
  11. call forth

Source and license

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