hamstrung
hamstrung adjective: restricted as if by being crippled with a hamstring; hamstringed. Also the simple past and past participle of hamstring.
Adjective
hamstrung (comparative more hamstrung, superlative most hamstrung)
- Restricted as if by being crippled with a hamstring; hamstringed.
- The hamstrung State environmental Protection Administration might get ministerial status.2008 March 5, Simon Elegant, “China Blog— The National People's Congress: Rubber Stamp?”, in Time
- To be hamstrung is to be unable to do what you want to do, as in “the government is hamstrung by the strike.” Literally it is to be crippled because your hamstrings have been cut and you cannot bend your knee. The word ham arose in English […]2015, Charles Hodgson, Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia, St. Martin's Griffin, →ISBN, page 202
Also used as
hamstrung is also the simple past and past participle of hamstring.
Forms of hamstrung
| comparative | more hamstrung |
|---|---|
| superlative | most hamstrung |
Questions about hamstrung
- What does hamstrung mean?
- Hamstrung means restricted as if by being crippled with a hamstring; hamstringed.
- What part of speech is hamstrung?
- Hamstrung is an adjective.
Words near hamstrung in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hamstrung (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-hamstrung.wav.
Cite this entry: “hamstrung.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hamstrung. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.