Word.ws English Dictionary

cling to the skirts of

cling to the skirts of verb: to depend upon and be unwilling to relinquish.

Verb

cling to the skirts of (third-person singular simple present clings to the skirts of, present participle clinging to the skirts of, simple past and past participle clung to the skirts of)

  1. To depend upon and be unwilling to relinquish.
    • Idleness is his chief good, and pauperism and theft are for the race not an unwelcome means of attaining their object. The vis inertia of the black blood is so great, that even a large mixture of white blood will overcome it only so far as to induce the individual to perform menial offices...1860, Thomas Prentice Kettell, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits As Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures
    • Therefore the falsely masculine cling to the skirts of the Diabolic for fear that they should be obliged to come to terms, one way or another, with God's just retribution, whereas the genuinely masculine, who are still fearful of God and therefore theoretically faithful unto the possibility of...2013, John O'Loughlin, Ethnic Universality -: The Next Totalitarianism, →ISBN
  2. To be closely associated with or proximate to.
    • Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the Unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange—had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell.1899 (please specify the page), Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part
    • Shall Lee, with tens of thousands of murders clinging to his skirts, escape the full desert of his crimes, and this man, who aided his victims, die a felon's death?1990, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day, →ISBN

Forms of cling to the skirts of

third-person singular presentclings to the skirts of
present participleclinging to the skirts of
past participleclung to the skirts of
pastclung to the skirts of

Origin of cling to the skirts of

From the image of a child clinging to his or her mother's skirts for reassurance and safety.

Questions about cling to the skirts of

What does cling to the skirts of mean?
Cling to the skirts of means to depend upon and be unwilling to relinquish.
What part of speech is cling to the skirts of?
Cling to the skirts of is a verb.
What is the past tense of cling to the skirts of?
The past tense of cling to the skirts of is clung to the skirts of.

Words near cling to the skirts of in the dictionary

  1. cling films
  2. cling on
  3. cling peach
  4. cling peaches
  5. cling to
  6. cling to the skirts of
  7. cling wrap
  8. cling wraps
  9. cling-on
  10. cling-ons
  11. cling-wrap

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cling to the skirts of (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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