Word.ws English Dictionary

dwindled

dwindled is the simple past and past participle of dwindle.

Meaning of dwindle

Verb

dwindle (third-person singular simple present dwindles, present participle dwindling, simple past and past participle dwindled)

  1. (intransitive) To decrease, shrink, diminish, reduce in size or intensity.
    • Their supplies began to dwindle after a week.
  2. (figuratively, intransitive) To fall away in quality; degenerate, sink.
    • VVearie Seu'nights, nine times nine, / Shall he dvvindle, peake, and pine: […]c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  3. (transitive) To lessen; to bring low.
    • Our drooping days are dwindled down to nought.a. 1749 (date written), James Thomson, “Spring”, in The Seasons, London: […] A[ndrew] Millar, and sold by Thomas Cadell, […], published 1768, →OCLC
  4. To break up or disperse.
    • there were only five hundred foot and three hundred horse left with him, for the blocking of Plymouth; the rest were dwindled away1702–1704, Edward [Hyde, 1st] Earl of Clarendon, (please specify |book=I to XVI), in The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Begun in the Year 1641. […], Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed...

Questions about dwindled

What is dwindled the simple past and past participle of?
Dwindled is the simple past and past participle of dwindle.

Words near dwindled in the dictionary

  1. dwimmer
  2. dwimmercraft
  3. dwimmers
  4. dwimmery
  5. dwindle
  6. dwindled
  7. dwindlement
  8. dwindler
  9. dwindlers
  10. dwindles
  11. dwindleth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dwindled (page history and authors); dwindle (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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Cite this entry: “dwindled.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dwindled. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.