Word.ws English Dictionary

hang back

hang back verb: to wait; to falter; to avoid proceeding through reluctance.

Verb

hang back (third-person singular simple present hangs back, present participle hanging back, simple past and past participle hung back)

  1. (informal) To wait; to falter; to avoid proceeding through reluctance.
    • '[…] Perhaps just at present he may be undecided; the smallness of your fortune may make him hang back; his friends may all advise him against it. But some of those little attentions and encouragements which ladies can so easily give, will fix him, in spite of himself […]'1811, [Jane Austen], chapter XI, in Sense and Sensibility […], volume II, London: […] C[harles] Roworth, […], and published by T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC
    • From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone?1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 36, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, page 182

hang back meaning in Kannada

hang back in Kannada

ಹಿಂದೆಗೆ, ಹಿಮ್ಮೆಟ್ಟು, ಕೈಬಿಡು, ಹಿಂಜರಿ, ಹಿಂದೇಟು ಹಾಕು, ಹಿಂದುಮುಂದು ನೋಡು

Forms of hang back

third-person singular presenthangs back
present participlehanging back
past participlehung back
pasthung back

Questions about hang back

What does hang back mean?
Hang back means to wait; to falter; to avoid proceeding through reluctance.
What is hang back in Kannada?
Hang back in Kannada is ಹಿಂದೆಗೆ, ಹಿಮ್ಮೆಟ್ಟು, ಕೈಬಿಡು. See Hang back meaning in Kannada.
What part of speech is hang back?
Hang back is a verb.
What is the past tense of hang back?
The past tense of hang back is hung back.

Words near hang back in the dictionary

  1. hang a shingle
  2. hang a uey
  3. hang about
  4. hang an arse
  5. hang around
  6. hang back
  7. hang behind
  8. hang by a hair
  9. hang by a thread
  10. hang by the eyelids
  11. hang dog

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hang back (page history and authors); hang back (Kannada Wiktionary) (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: “hang back.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hang_back. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.