Word.ws English Dictionary

give ground

give ground verb: to retreat.

Verb

give ground (third-person singular simple present gives ground, present participle giving ground, simple past gave ground, past participle given ground)

  1. To retreat.
    • Those male moose at the southeast arm didn't frighten very much when we docked to fly-fish one day. One was so scared of us he just walked toward us and snorted. We gave ground.1959, Harold G. (Hack) Miller, “Rod and gun”, in Hearings […] , Washington: United States Government Printing Office, page 101
  2. (figuratively) To yield an advantage.

Synonyms of give ground

Antonyms

Forms of give ground

third-person singular presentgives ground
present participlegiving ground
pastgave ground
past participlegiven ground

Questions about give ground

What does give ground mean?
Give ground means to retreat.
What part of speech is give ground?
Give ground is a verb.
What is the past tense of give ground?
The past tense of give ground is gave ground.

Words near give ground in the dictionary

  1. give ear
  2. give face
  3. give forth
  4. give gray hair to
  5. give grey hair to
  6. give ground
  7. give hat
  8. give head
  9. give heed
  10. give in
  11. give into

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: give ground (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “give ground.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/give_ground. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.