Word.ws English Dictionary

chop and change

chop and change verb: to change or exchange repeatedly.

Verb

chop and change (third-person singular simple present chops and changes, present participle chopping and changing, simple past and past participle chopped and changed)

  1. To change or exchange repeatedly.
    • [...] and a good many people at B.T.C. headquarters and at Euston are still smarting from the Select Committee strictures on the L.M.R. Western Lines electrification estimates, whilst the nation at large is suffering from the effects of chopping and changing the electrification schemes.1962 September, “Talking of Trains: Money for (road) jam”, in Modern Railways, page 153
    • She pauses. “We were all very young. It was all chop and change. Quite a lot of things were experimental, I suppose. How to live a life! I don’t know whether I’ve got it now, but never mind – I had it!”2021 March 27, Simon Hattenstone, quoting Charlotte Rampling, “Charlotte Rampling: ‘I am prickly. People who are prickly can’t be hurt any more’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
  2. To rearrange, reconfigure, or customise.
    • For quotations using this term, see Citations:chop and change.

Forms of chop and change

third-person singular presentchops and changes
present participlechopping and changing
past participlechopped and changed
pastchopped and changed

Words formed from chop and change

Questions about chop and change

What does chop and change mean?
Chop and change means to change or exchange repeatedly.
What part of speech is chop and change?
Chop and change is a verb.
What is the past tense of chop and change?
The past tense of chop and change is chopped and changed.

Words near chop and change in the dictionary

  1. choosy
  2. choot pattern
  3. choottachi
  4. choottachis
  5. chop
  6. chop and change
  7. chop and chat
  8. chop and drop
  9. chop chop
  10. chop chord
  11. chop chords

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chop and change (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: “chop and change.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chop_and_change. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.