Word.ws English Dictionary

drag one's feet

drag one's feet verb: to procrastinate, put off; to dawdle, avoid, or make progress slowly and reluctantly.

Verb

drag one's feet (third-person singular simple present drags one's feet, present participle dragging one's feet, simple past and past participle dragged one's feet)

  1. (idiomatic) To procrastinate, put off; to dawdle, avoid, or make progress slowly and reluctantly.
    • I have been dragging my feet about filing my taxes.
    • There was much to love about this last season, from the tense opening barfight to the finale shootout with the IRA, which was so disorientingly murky and gas-filled it felt otherworldly. But it struggled to ever quite get going, with the first five episodes dragging their feet in a way that began...2022 December 27, Alexi Duggins, Hollie Richardson, Kate Abbott, “The Rings of Power to Conversations With Friends: 2022’s TV letdowns”, in The Guardian
  2. (idiomatic) To intentionally stall, to delay, to obstruct.

Synonyms of drag one's feet

Forms of drag one's feet

third-person singular presentdrags one's feet
present participledragging one's feet
past participledragged one's feet
pastdragged one's feet

Origin of drag one's feet

From the idea of walking while dragging one's feet along the ground, either from lack of enthusiasm or to intentionally slow down movement. Compare dig in one's heels (“firmly oppose”).

Words formed from drag one's feet

Questions about drag one's feet

What does drag one's feet mean?
Drag one's feet means to procrastinate, put off; to dawdle, avoid, or make progress slowly and reluctantly.
What part of speech is drag one's feet?
Drag one's feet is a verb.
What is the past tense of drag one's feet?
The past tense of drag one's feet is dragged one's feet.

Words near drag one's feet in the dictionary

  1. drag king
  2. drag kings
  3. drag mother
  4. drag on
  5. drag one's balls across
  6. drag one's feet
  7. drag one's heels
  8. drag out
  9. drag parachute
  10. drag parachutes
  11. drag path

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: drag one's feet (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-drag one's feet.ogg.

Cite this entry: “drag one's feet.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/drag_one%27s_feet. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.