Word.ws English Dictionary

fence-sit

fence-sit verb: to sit on the fence (to remain neutral on a certain topic).

Verb

fence-sit (third-person singular simple present fence-sits, present participle fence-sitting, simple past and past participle fence-sat)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive, rare) To sit on the fence (to remain neutral on a certain topic).
    • My point, therefore, in beginning with what everyone knows are the two main views of Othello (and hence Othello) is not to adjudicate between them, nor to dismiss both, nor to fence-sit, but to suggest that each answers to something important in the play – which also means that each underestimates...1980, Jane Adamson, Othello As Tragedy: Some Problems of Judgement and Feeling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 12

Forms of fence-sit

third-person singular presentfence-sits
present participlefence-sitting
past participlefence-sat
pastfence-sat

Questions about fence-sit

What does fence-sit mean?
Fence-sit means to sit on the fence (to remain neutral on a certain topic).
What part of speech is fence-sit?
Fence-sit is a verb.
What is the past tense of fence-sit?
The past tense of fence-sit is fence-sat.

Words near fence-sit in the dictionary

  1. fence wires
  2. fence-mending
  3. fence-post
  4. fence-posts
  5. fence-sat
  6. fence-sit
  7. fence-sits
  8. fence-sitter
  9. fence-sitters
  10. fence-sitting
  11. fence-viewer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fence-sit (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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