Word.ws English Dictionary

curry favor

curry favor verb: to seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.

Verb

curry favor (third-person singular simple present curries favor, present participle currying favor, simple past and past participle curried favor)

  1. (idiomatic) To seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.
    • […]always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences;[…]1854 August 9, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC
    • Other people would say so, and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for the sake of making himself important and getting on in the world.1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XVIII, in Middlemarch […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book (please...

curry favor meaning in Hindi, Vietnamese and Myanmar

curry favor in Hindi

to seek to gain favor by flattery
चापलूसी करना chāplūsī karna

curry favor in Vietnamese

to seek to gain favor by flattery
lấy lòng, xu nịnh, nịnh, nịnh nọt, nịnh hót

curry favor in Myanmar

to seek to gain favor by flattery
ဖော်လံဖား hpaulamhpa:, ဖား hpa:, ဘောမ bhau:ma.

Forms of curry favor

third-person singular presentcurries favor
present participlecurrying favor
past participlecurried favor
pastcurried favor
alternative UKcurry favour

Origin of curry favor

Originally from a French poem Roman de Fauvel, written in the early 1300s; Fauvel was a conniving stallion, and the play was a satire on the corruption of social life. The name Fauvel points to the French fauve (“chestnut, reddish-yellow, or fawn”), another sense of fauve meaning the class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, and the medieval belief that a fallow horse was a symbol of deceit and dishonesty. The phrase curry Fauvel, then, referred to currying (“combing”) the horse, and was altered (as folk etymology) by later speakers to curry favor.

Questions about curry favor

What does curry favor mean?
Curry favor means to seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.
What is curry favor in Hindi?
Curry favor in Hindi is चापलूसी करना (chāplūsī karna). See Curry favor meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is curry favor?
Curry favor is a verb.
What is the past tense of curry favor?
The past tense of curry favor is curried favor.

Words near curry favor in the dictionary

  1. curry chip
  2. curry chips
  3. curry comb
  4. curry combs
  5. Curry County
  6. curry favor
  7. curry favour
  8. curry house
  9. curry houses
  10. curry ketchup
  11. curry ketchups

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: curry favor (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-curry favor.ogg.

Cite this entry: “curry favor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/curry_favor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.