Word.ws English Dictionary

drive-by

/ˈdɹaɪvˌbaɪ/

drive-by adjective: of a crime, etc., carried out from a moving vehicle.

Adjective

drive-by (not comparable)

  1. (informal) Of a crime, etc., carried out from a moving vehicle.
  2. (figuratively) Done in a cursory or superficial manner with little regard for the issues involved; careless, offhand.
    • If the highly visible mockery of teenagers leads to a serious examination of the practices and institutions that perpetuate racism, perhaps it will be worth it. But I have my doubts. This kind of drive-by scapegoating does not seem conducive to genuine reflection (and it definitely doesn't...2012 April 11, L. V. Anderson, “Talking to Teens Who Tweeted Racist Things About The Hunger Games”, in Slate, archived from the original on 02 Jun 2023
    • But what hinders students far more than the technical side is Wikipedia's editing culture. Many of their contributions got reversed almost immediately, in what is known as a "drive-by deletion."2018 October 8, Dawn Bazely, “Why Nobel winner Donna Strickland didn’t have a Wikipedia page”, in The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the...

Noun

drive-by (plural drive-bys)

  1. (informal) A crime, such as a shooting, carried out from a moving vehicle.

Forms of drive-by

Adjective
alternative formdriveby
alternative formdrive by
Noun
pluraldrive-bys

Words formed from drive-by

Phrases with drive-by

Questions about drive-by

What does drive-by mean?
Drive-by means of a crime, etc., carried out from a moving vehicle.
What part of speech is drive-by?
Drive-by can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce drive-by?
Drive-by is pronounced /ˈdɹaɪvˌbaɪ/.

Words near drive-by in the dictionary

  1. drive unit
  2. drive units
  3. drive up
  4. drive wheel
  5. drive wheels
  6. drive-by
  7. drive-by download
  8. drive-by downloads
  9. drive-by media
  10. drive-by-wire
  11. drive-bys

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: drive-by (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-drive-by.wav.

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