Word.ws English Dictionary

down pat

down pat adjective: thoroughly practiced, rehearsed, or understood; mastered.

Adjective

down pat (not comparable)

  1. Thoroughly practiced, rehearsed, or understood; mastered.
    • to have … down pat
    • She's got that Indian wrestlin' down pat, an' she's built for it.1913 October, Jack London, chapter VIII, in The Valley of the Moon, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, book III, page 399
    Synonyms:
    off pat

Examples of down pat in a sentence

  • He has the look of Bruce Lee down pat, with the same defiant expression and spare but muscled frame.2008 October 10, Clifford Coonan, “The Bruce Lee legend”, in The Independent, UK, retrieved 04 Nov 2008:
  • You get to do it only when your instructor is convinced that you have your landings down pat.2023 November 26, Patrick Chovanec, “This Is Your Pilot Speaking”, in The Atlantic:

Synonyms of down pat

Origin of down pat

Unknown, but clearly related to pat (“suitable, fitting”, adjective) and pat (adverb); possibly related to pat (“light tap”) in the sense of hitting the mark.

Questions about down pat

What does down pat mean?
Down pat means thoroughly practiced, rehearsed, or understood; mastered.
How do you use down pat in a sentence?
He has the look of Bruce Lee down pat, with the same defiant expression and spare but muscled frame.
What part of speech is down pat?
Down pat is an adjective.

Words near down pat in the dictionary

  1. down lows
  2. down mattress
  3. down on one's knees
  4. down on one's luck
  5. down on one's uppers
  6. down pat
  7. down payment
  8. down payments
  9. down perm
  10. down perms
  11. down quark

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: down pat (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-down pat.ogg.

Cite this entry: “down pat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/down_pat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.