Word.ws English Dictionary

call in sick

call in sick verb: to inform one's workplace or school that one temporarily cannot attend work or school due to illness.

Verb

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

  1. (informal, intransitive) To inform one's workplace or school that one temporarily cannot attend work or school due to illness.
    • "It only overloaded because of how low the power was when I fired! The guns are constantly being recharged tonight, and you should've called in sick back then!" "IT'S HARD TO CALL IN SICK WHEN ALL YOU CAN SAY IS 'MEOW'!"2005 December 2, Dan Shive, El Goonish Shive (webcomic), Comic for Friday, Dec 2, 2005

Forms of call in sick

third-person singular presentcalls in sick
present participlecalling in sick
past participlecalled in sick
pastcalled in sick

Questions about call in sick

What does call in sick mean?
Call in sick means to inform one's workplace or school that one temporarily cannot attend work or school due to illness.
What part of speech is call in sick?
Call in sick is a verb.
What is the past tense of call in sick?
The past tense of call in sick is called in sick.

Words near call in sick in the dictionary

  1. call histories
  2. call history
  3. call house
  4. call houses
  5. call in
  6. call in sick
  7. call in the wilderness
  8. call into doubt
  9. call into question
  10. call it
  11. call it a day

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: call in sick (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-call in sick.wav.

Cite this entry: “call in sick.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/call_in_sick. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.