Word.ws English Dictionary

cry it out

cry it out verb: of a baby: to be left alone to cry until falling asleep (recommended in some approaches to parenting).

Verb

cry it out (third-person singular simple present cries it out, present participle crying it out, simple past and past participle cried it out)

  1. Of a baby: to be left alone to cry until falling asleep (recommended in some approaches to parenting).
    • The same rules for maintaining sleep should be used for autistic children as for typical children—short interventions that are not repeated, and a period in which the child “cries it out.”2007, Bryna Siegel, Helping Children with Autism Learn
    • Clearly, crying it out is too brutal, and no-cry sleep solutions are too slow; the only ideal way to deal with sleep problems is to avoid them in the first place.2010, Cathryn Tobin, The Lull-a-Baby Sleep Plan

Forms of cry it out

third-person singular presentcries it out
present participlecrying it out
past participlecried it out
pastcried it out

Questions about cry it out

What does cry it out mean?
Cry it out means of a baby: to be left alone to cry until falling asleep (recommended in some approaches to parenting).
What part of speech is cry it out?
Cry it out is a verb.
What is the past tense of cry it out?
The past tense of cry it out is cried it out.

Words near cry it out in the dictionary

  1. cry harder
  2. cry havoc
  3. cry in one's beer
  4. cry in the wilderness
  5. cry into one's beer
  6. cry it out
  7. cry like a baby
  8. cry like a little girl
  9. cry off
  10. cry on
  11. cry one's eyes out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cry it out (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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