Word.ws English Dictionary

cottoned on

cottoned on is the simple past and past participle of cotton on.

Meaning of cotton on

Verb

cotton on (third-person singular simple present cottons on, present participle cottoning on, simple past and past participle cottoned on)

  1. (intransitive) To realize; come to understand.
    • “That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. […] Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don’t care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.”2019 July 30, Rowena Mason, “Dominic Cummings said Tory MPs do not care about poor people or NHS”, in The Guardian
    Synonyms:
    catch on, glom on

Questions about cottoned on

What is cottoned on the simple past and past participle of?
Cottoned on is the simple past and past participle of cotton on.

Words near cottoned on in the dictionary

  1. cottonbush
  2. cottonclad
  3. cottonclads
  4. Cottone
  5. cottoned
  6. cottoned on
  7. cottoned on to
  8. cottoned onto
  9. cottoned to
  10. cottonee
  11. cottonees

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cottoned on (page history and authors); cotton on (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: “cottoned on.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cottoned_on. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.