duke out
duke out verb: to fight, especially with fists; to knock out (someone).
Verb
duke out (third-person singular simple present dukes out, present participle duking out, simple past and past participle duked out)
- To fight, especially with fists; to knock out (someone).
- Both perfect homes are destroyed—and yet the two men remain effectively passive, locked in hang-ups while assorted protégés and allies do all the duking out and legwork.2016 May 23, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “Apocalypse pits the strengths of the X-Men series against the weaknesses”, in The Onion AV Club
- How does the media love Twitter? Let us count the ways: as a tech platform practically indispensable to the work of newsgathering; as a metrics system designating clear numerical value to once-squishy concepts of popularity and esteem; as a gossip-fueled lunchroom of the elites more or less...April 14 2022, Delia Cai, “Severance, the New York Times’s Twitter Guidelines, and the Forever Illusion of Work-Life Balance”, in Vanity Fair
Forms of duke out
| third-person singular present | dukes out |
|---|---|
| present participle | duking out |
| past participle | duked out |
| past | duked out |
Origin of duke out
From duke it out.
Questions about duke out
- What does duke out mean?
- Duke out means to fight, especially with fists; to knock out (someone).
- What part of speech is duke out?
- Duke out is a verb.
- What is the past tense of duke out?
- The past tense of duke out is duked out.
Words near duke out in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: duke out (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:
Cite this entry: “duke out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/duke_out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.