Word.ws English Dictionary

glossing over

glossing over is the present participle and gerund of gloss over.

Meaning of gloss over

Verb

gloss over (third-person singular simple present glosses over, present participle glossing over, simple past and past participle glossed over)

  1. (idiomatic, transitive) To cover up a mistake or a crime; to hush up or whitewash.
    • They glossed over the problem, hoping that the customers wouldn't notice.
    Synonyms:
    paper over
  2. (idiomatic, transitive) To treat something with less care than it in some ways deserves; to ignore, or at least to discount or dismiss for the current purposes.
    • This book only glosses over quantum mechanics; it doesn't go into detail.

Questions about glossing over

What is glossing over the present participle and gerund of?
Glossing over is the present participle and gerund of gloss over.

Words near glossing over in the dictionary

  1. glossily
  2. glossina
  3. glossiness
  4. glossinesses
  5. glossing
  6. glossing over
  7. glossings
  8. glossinid
  9. glossinids
  10. glossiphoniid
  11. glossiphoniids

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: glossing over (page history and authors); gloss over (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: “glossing over.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/glossing_over. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.