Word.ws English Dictionary

hit back

hit back verb: to retaliate.

Verb

hit back (third-person singular simple present hits back, present participle hitting back, simple past and past participle hit back)

  1. (intransitive) To retaliate
    • The Baggies almost hit back instantly when Graham Dorrans broke from midfield and pulled the trigger from 15 yards but Paul Robinson did superbly to tip the Scot's drive around the post.2010 December 28, Kevin Darlin, “West Brom 1 - 3 Blackburn”, in BBC
  2. (slang, transitive, African-American Vernacular) To return a missed phone call with (someone).

hit back meaning in Malayalam and Kannada

hit back in Malayalam

retaliate, respond, reply
തിരിച്ചടിക്കുക, പ്രതികാരം ചെയ്ക, തിരിച്ചടി നടത്തുക, പകരംചെയ്യുക, പകവീട്ടുക, പകരംവീട്ടുക

hit back in Kannada

ಮುಯ್ಯಿತೀರಿಸು

Forms of hit back

third-person singular presenthits back
present participlehitting back
past participlehit back
pasthit back

Questions about hit back

What does hit back mean?
Hit back means to retaliate.
What is hit back in Malayalam?
Hit back in Malayalam is തിരിച്ചടിക്കുക, പ്രതികാരം ചെയ്ക, തിരിച്ചടി നടത്തുക. See Hit back meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is hit back?
Hit back is a verb.
What is the past tense of hit back?
The past tense of hit back is hit back.

Words near hit back in the dictionary

  1. hit and hope
  2. hit and ran
  3. hit and run
  4. hit and runs
  5. hit away
  6. hit back
  7. hit batsman
  8. hit batsmen
  9. hit below one's weight
  10. hit below the belt
  11. hit bottom

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hit back (page history and authors); hit back (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); hit 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-hit back.wav.

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