Word.ws English Dictionary

calling down

calling down is the present participle and gerund of call down.

Meaning of call down

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

Questions about calling down

What is calling down the present participle and gerund of?
Calling down is the present participle and gerund of call down.

Words near calling down in the dictionary

  1. calling card
  2. calling cards
  3. calling collect
  4. calling crab
  5. calling crabs
  6. calling down
  7. calling for
  8. calling forth
  9. calling in
  10. calling in sick
  11. calling into doubt

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: calling down (page history and authors); 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.

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