Word.ws English Dictionary

claw back

claw back verb: to recover or retake, with great effort, something that was lost, often by a government or official agency.

Verb

claw back (third-person singular simple present claws back, present participle clawing back, simple past and past participle clawed back)

  1. (transitive) To recover or retake, with great effort, something that was lost, often by a government or official agency.
    • I was initially refused a refund, but eventually managed to claw back part of the money.
    • Michael Gove has tried to claw his way back into the race to be Britain’s next prime minister with a pledge to govern for “overlooked families and undervalued communities” – and a series of personal attacks on frontrunner Boris Johnson.2019 June 10, Heather Stewart, “Gove reboots Tory leadership bid with attack on Johnson”, in The Guardian

Forms of claw back

third-person singular presentclaws back
present participleclawing back
past participleclawed back
pastclawed back

Questions about claw back

What does claw back mean?
Claw back means to recover or retake, with great effort, something that was lost, often by a government or official agency.
What part of speech is claw back?
Claw back is a verb.
What is the past tense of claw back?
The past tense of claw back is clawed back.

Words near claw back in the dictionary

  1. clavus
  2. clavuses
  3. clavy
  4. claw
  5. claw away
  6. claw back
  7. claw clip
  8. claw clips
  9. claw crane
  10. claw cranes
  11. claw frog

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: claw back (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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