Word.ws English Dictionary

chickening out

chickening out is the present participle and gerund of chicken out.

Meaning of chicken out

Verb

chicken out (third-person singular simple present chickens out, present participle chickening out, simple past and past participle chickened out)

  1. (idiomatic) To shy away from a daring task; to decline, refuse, or avoid something due to fear or uncertainty.
    • We almost convinced his dad to ride the roller coaster, but he chickened out when he saw how high it went.

Questions about chickening out

What is chickening out the present participle and gerund of?
Chickening out is the present participle and gerund of chicken out.

Words near chickening out in the dictionary

  1. chickenhouse
  2. chickenhouses
  3. chickenier
  4. chickeniest
  5. chickening
  6. chickening out
  7. chickenish
  8. chickenization
  9. chickenize
  10. chickenized
  11. chickenizes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chickening out (page history and authors); chicken out (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: “chickening out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chickening_out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.