Word.ws English Dictionary

fire the starting gun

fire the starting gun verb: to launch or trigger an event or situation.

Verb

fire the starting gun (third-person singular simple present fires the starting gun, present participle firing the starting gun, simple past and past participle fired the starting gun)

  1. (idiomatic, often) To launch or trigger an event or situation.
    • The TV and radio star Noel Edmonds, who is expected to join ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here jungle camp this week, is also likely to fire the starting gun on a £60m lawsuit against Lloyds Bank.2018 November 19, Kalyeena Makortoff, “Noel Edmonds likely to file £60m Lloyds lawsuit on Wednesday”, in The Guardian
    • Halks-Miller’s discovery fired the starting gun on the race to develop a diagnostic blood test. Illumina spun off a new company, Grail, to develop the test, raising more than $2bn from investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the Chinese company Tencent.2023 May 17, Jamie Smyth, “Quick blood tests to spot cancer: will they help or harm patients?”, in Financial Times

Forms of fire the starting gun

third-person singular presentfires the starting gun
present participlefiring the starting gun
past participlefired the starting gun
pastfired the starting gun

Questions about fire the starting gun

What does fire the starting gun mean?
Fire the starting gun means to launch or trigger an event or situation.
What part of speech is fire the starting gun?
Fire the starting gun is a verb.
What is the past tense of fire the starting gun?
The past tense of fire the starting gun is fired the starting gun.

Words near fire the starting gun in the dictionary

  1. fire teaser
  2. fire teasers
  3. fire temple
  4. fire temples
  5. fire tetrahedron
  6. fire the starting gun
  7. fire tongs
  8. fire tower
  9. fire tower stairway
  10. fire tower stairways
  11. fire towers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fire the starting gun (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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