Word.ws English Dictionary

drill down

drill down verb: to examine something on a more detailed level.

Verb

drill down (third-person singular simple present drills down, present participle drilling down, simple past and past participle drilled down)

  1. (intransitive, literally) To examine something on a more detailed level.
    • The issue can be drilled down to a simple yes or no.
  2. (idiomatic) To examine information at another level or in greater detail; especially in a database, to navigate to a more detailed level or record.
    • From the employee list, you can drill down to find addresses and pay history.
  3. (idiomatic) To replace data with more specific data.
    • Clicking here lets you replace the annual sales data with monthly data, drilling down to help you track revenue.
  4. (intransitive) To practice maneuvers in order to memorize them; to drill thoroughly (to practice).
    • We've drilled down on guarding players with his skillset.
  5. (transitive) To score points; to do well in a basketball game.
    • They drilled down three pointers throughout the second half.

Noun

drill down (plural drill downs)

  1. an internal competition used to practice marching commands, in which the last person caught improperly executing a command wins
    • We knew someone had lost when the last two people in the drill down ended up facing each other.

Synonyms of drill down

Forms of drill down

Verb
third-person singular presentdrills down
present participledrilling down
past participledrilled down
pastdrilled down
Noun
pluraldrill downs

Questions about drill down

What does drill down mean?
Drill down means to examine something on a more detailed level.
What part of speech is drill down?
Drill down can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of drill down?
The past tense of drill down is drilled down.

Words near drill down in the dictionary

  1. drill bits
  2. drill bow
  3. drill bows
  4. drill core
  5. drill cores
  6. drill down
  7. drill downs
  8. drill floor
  9. drill floors
  10. drill ground
  11. drill grounds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: drill down (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-drill down.ogg.

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