Word.ws English Dictionary

gumshoe

UK/ˈɡʌm.ʃuː/

gumshoe noun: a sneaker or rubber overshoe.

gumshoe: a sneaker or rubber overshoe
Image: Peregrinus, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

gumshoe (plural gumshoes)

  1. A sneaker or rubber overshoe.
  2. (slang) A detective.
    • "Who's this gumshoe guy from the bush league tailin' us?"1920, William MacLeod Raine, chapter 20, in The Big-Town Round-Up
    • So how does Santa go up and down chimneys and keep his clothes clean? MAIRE NIC SUIBHNE and her junior gumshoes get their claws into assorted Messrs Claus and come up with an answer . . .1988 December 16, “Grotto busters”, in Evening Standard, London, →OCLC, page 25, column 2

Verb

gumshoe (third-person singular simple present gumshoes, present participle gumshoeing, simple past and past participle gumshoed)

  1. (slang) To act as a detective.
    • The next thing they did was to send a man sent down there from Baltimore and he spent a good deal of time gumshoeing around in that county trying to get another individual put in as secretary-treasurer.1933, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Agriculture, Hearings, page 25
    • But these days, more and more women are gumshoeing through the pages of murder mysteries.1988 September 23, Achy Obejas, “Calendar”, in Chicago Reader

gumshoe meaning in Bengali

gumshoe in Bengali

slang: a detective
টিকটিকি ṭikṭiki

Synonyms of gumshoe

Forms of gumshoe

Noun
pluralgumshoes
Verb
third-person singular presentgumshoes
present participlegumshoeing
past participlegumshoed
pastgumshoed

Origin of gumshoe

From gum + shoe.

Questions about gumshoe

What does gumshoe mean?
Gumshoe means a sneaker or rubber overshoe.
What is gumshoe in Bengali?
Gumshoe in Bengali is টিকটিকি (ṭikṭiki). See Gumshoe meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is gumshoe?
Gumshoe can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce gumshoe?
Gumshoe is pronounced /ˈɡʌm.ʃuː/ (UK).
What is the plural of gumshoe?
The plural of gumshoe is gumshoes.

Words near gumshoe in the dictionary

  1. gums arabic
  2. gums up
  3. gums up the works
  4. gumshield
  5. gumshields
  6. gumshoe
  7. gumshoed
  8. gumshoeing
  9. gumshoes
  10. gumsucker
  11. gumsuckers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gumshoe (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-gumshoe.ogg, en-au-gumshoe.ogg.

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