Word.ws English Dictionary

from the hip

from the hip prepositional phrase: instinctively; without planning ahead.

Prepositional phrase

  1. Instinctively; without planning ahead.
    • Hasluck tells the story at a rapid pace and with racy charm. There is some refreshingly Australian talking from the hip. "When a company's being milked, you don't look for a bucket under its tits. You look up its arse."1980, New Statesman
    • By necessity, then, most of us were teaching from the hip.1993, Linda Myers, Approaches to Computer Writing Classrooms: Learning From Practical Experience, page 86

Origin of from the hip

Extension of shoot from the hip.

Questions about from the hip

What does from the hip mean?
From the hip means instinctively; without planning ahead.
What part of speech is from the hip?
From the hip is a prepositional phrase.

Words near from the hip in the dictionary

  1. from the getgo
  2. from the git
  3. from the git-go
  4. from the ground up
  5. from the heart
  6. from the hip
  7. from the jump
  8. from the off
  9. from the outset
  10. from the river to the sea
  11. from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: from the hip (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: “from the hip.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/from_the_hip. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.