Word.ws English Dictionary

coat-trailing

coat-trailing noun: a disingenuous act or arrangement intended to provoke a desired response.

Noun

coat-trailing (countable and uncountable, plural coat-trailings)

  1. (UK) A disingenuous act or arrangement intended to provoke a desired response.
    • The Peshawar agent will often be an ambitious man "in a hurry," in which case he will push the forward policy, and amongst future Viceroys Aucklands, Lyttons, Lansdownes, and Elgins will be more frequent than Lawrences and Curzons, and then we shall have complications, coat-trailings, warlike...1904, Septimus Smet Thorburn, The Punjab in Peace and War, page 348
    • It would still remain a perfectly good Bill without the Clause. Its presence in it is nothing but what I said earlier, namely, a typical example of coat-trailing.1962, Northern Ireland Parliament Senate, Parliamentary Debates. The Senate Official Report, page 504

Examples of coat-trailing in a sentence

  • My own coat-trailing was totally ineffective, but the system of having an obvious road black, with 'cut-offs' behind and down side streets to catch those deliberately avoiding them proved useful.2006, Peter Hinchcliffe, John T. Ducker, Maria Holt, Without Glory in Arabia: The British Retreat from Aden, →ISBN, page 182:
  • British M.I.6, who were responsible for the planting, obviously failed to do their coat-trailing either in the right places or with the right Abwehr officers.2016, Barton Whaley, Turnabout and Deception, →ISBN:

Forms of coat-trailing

pluralcoat-trailings

Origin of coat-trailing

From the idea of deliberately trailing one's coat on the ground to entice another to step on it.

Questions about coat-trailing

What does coat-trailing mean?
Coat-trailing means a disingenuous act or arrangement intended to provoke a desired response.
How do you use coat-trailing in a sentence?
My own coat-trailing was totally ineffective, but the system of having an obvious road black, with 'cut-offs' behind and down side streets to catch those deliberately avoiding them proved useful.
What part of speech is coat-trailing?
Coat-trailing is a noun.
What is the plural of coat-trailing?
The plural of coat-trailing is coat-trailings.

Words near coat-trailing in the dictionary

  1. coat-stands
  2. coat-tail
  3. coat-tailed
  4. coat-tailing
  5. coat-tails
  6. coat-trailing
  7. coat-trailings
  8. coatability
  9. coatable
  10. Coatbridge
  11. coatbuttons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: coat-trailing (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: “coat-trailing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/coat-trailing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.