Word.ws English Dictionary

chipping away

chipping away is the present participle and gerund of chip away.

Meaning of chip away

Verb

chip away (third-person singular simple present chips away, present participle chipping away, simple past and past participle chipped away)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To reduce or weaken bit by bit; often used with at.
    • Iraneus contrasts the unity and integrity of these writings with the distorted, contextless citations of the Gnostics. He describes the code of textual harassment that allows these heretics to chip away at the Scriptures, […]1991, Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea, page 24

Questions about chipping away

What is chipping away the present participle and gerund of?
Chipping away is the present participle and gerund of chip away.

Words near chipping away in the dictionary

  1. Chippindales
  2. chippiness
  3. chipping
  4. chipping and charging
  5. chipping at
  6. chipping away
  7. Chipping Barnet
  8. chipping bird
  9. chipping birds
  10. Chipping Campden
  11. chipping in

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chipping away (page history and authors); chip away (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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