Word.ws English Dictionary

cottoning on to

cottoning on to is the present participle and gerund of cotton on to.

Meaning of cotton on to

Verb

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

  1. (slang) To come to know or understand (something).
    • Buuut the Kamchatka eventually showed up, with news: whilst the main fleet had almost triggered a war with the British Empire, she'd managed to outdo them all, by reporting that, not only had she fired three hundred shells in an engagement with three Japanese ships, but, in fact, had shot at a...2019 March 13, Drachinifel, 26:59 from the start, in The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron - Voyage of the Damned, archived from the original on 29 Jan 2023
  2. (archaic, slang) Synonym of cotton to (“like, tolerate”).
    Synonyms:
    cotton to

Questions about cottoning on to

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

Words near cottoning on to in the dictionary

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

Source and license

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