excuse you
excuse you phrase: an indignant response to an individual who has behaved rudely or insolently and has failed to apologize.
Phrase
excuse you
- An indignant response to an individual who has behaved rudely or insolently and has failed to apologize.
- He raised his brows, 'Excuse me, or should I say, excuse you?'1996, Vickie Moore, This Time Forever, page 123
- Excuse you, you're in my way.2000, Karen McCullah Lutz, Kirsten Smith, Legally Blonde
Origin of excuse you
By analogy with excuse me, which is used to apologize. First appears in the late twentieth century.
Questions about excuse you
- What does excuse you mean?
- Excuse you means an indignant response to an individual who has behaved rudely or insolently and has failed to apologize.
- What part of speech is excuse you?
- Excuse you is a phrase.
Words near excuse you in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: excuse you (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-excuse you.wav.
Cite this entry: “excuse you.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/excuse_you. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.