Word.ws English Dictionary

falling back on

falling back on is the present participle and gerund of fall back on.

Meaning of fall back on

Verb

fall back on (third-person singular simple present falls back on, present participle falling back on, simple past fell back on, past participle fallen back on)

  1. (transitive) To turn to as a substitute; to rely on as a backup.
    • Since first tossing its cartoonish, good-time cock-rock to the masses in the early ’00s, The Darkness has always fallen back on this defense: The band is a joke, but hey, it’s a good joke. With Hot Cakes—the group’s third album, and first since reforming last year—the laughter has died. In its...2012 August 21, Jason Heller, “The Darkness: Hot Cakes (Music Review)”, in The Onion AV Club
  2. (transitive) to be blamed on.
    • If we do this, the consequences will fall back on you.

Questions about falling back on

What is falling back on the present participle and gerund of?
Falling back on is the present participle and gerund of fall back on.

Words near falling back on in the dictionary

  1. falling at the final hurdle
  2. falling at the last hurdle
  3. falling away
  4. falling back
  5. falling back into
  6. falling back on
  7. falling back upon
  8. falling behind
  9. falling below
  10. falling between the cracks
  11. falling between two stools

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: falling back on (page history and authors); fall back on (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: “falling back on.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/falling_back_on. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.