Word.ws English Dictionary

fourth gear

fourth gear noun: the fourth of the available gears in a transmission or other gearbox.

Noun

fourth gear (countable and uncountable, plural fourth gears)

  1. The fourth of the available gears in a transmission or other gearbox.
    Synonyms:
    fourth
  2. (dated, idiomatic) A maximal level of effort.
    • During the seventies, Shashi Kapoor went into fourth gear in Bollywood, while Merchant and Ivory made a slew of films, many of which were not set in India.2009, Madhu Jain, The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema, page 243
    • After all, he did the very same thing, pool and lunch, every Friday afternoon for five months—Friday perfect because it gave his cock a rest before the weekend, when it went into fourth gear.2014, Paul Monette, The Gold Diggers: A Novel

Synonyms of fourth gear

Forms of fourth gear

pluralfourth gears

Origin of fourth gear

The figurative sense reflects that in some times and places, fourth gear was the highest gear that a car could achieve; compare French en quatrième vitesse.

Questions about fourth gear

What does fourth gear mean?
Fourth gear means the fourth of the available gears in a transmission or other gearbox.
What part of speech is fourth gear?
Fourth gear is a noun.
What is the plural of fourth gear?
The plural of fourth gear is fourth gears.

Words near fourth gear in the dictionary

  1. fourth downs
  2. fourth estate
  3. fourth finger
  4. fourth fingers
  5. fourth freedom rights
  6. fourth gear
  7. fourth gears
  8. fourth gender
  9. fourth genders
  10. fourth grade
  11. fourth grader

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fourth gear (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: “fourth gear.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fourth_gear. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.