Word.ws English Dictionary

cottoning on

cottoning on is the present participle and gerund 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 cottoning on

What is cottoning on the present participle and gerund of?
Cottoning on is the present participle and gerund of cotton on.

Words near cottoning on in the dictionary

  1. cottongrass
  2. cottongrasses
  3. cottongum
  4. Cottonian
  5. cottoning
  6. cottoning on
  7. cottoning on to
  8. cottoning onto
  9. cottoning to
  10. cottonization
  11. cottonize

Source and license

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