Word.ws English Dictionary

hit the accelerator

hit the accelerator verb: synonym of hit the gas.

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) Synonym of hit the gas.
    • If Frey is right about the technology trap then this may also imply that China could leap ahead in the AI arms race. Sensitive to voter interests, western democracies may yet touch the brakes when it comes to mass deployment of AI technology, while authoritarian regimes hit the accelerator hard.2019 July 11, John Thornhill, “Does tech threaten to rerun the worst of the Industrial Revolution?”, in Financial Times
    Synonyms:
    hit the gas

Synonyms of hit the accelerator

Forms of hit the accelerator

third-person singular presenthits the accelerator
present participlehitting the accelerator
past participlehit the accelerator
pasthit the accelerator

Questions about hit the accelerator

What does hit the accelerator mean?
Hit the accelerator means synonym of hit the gas.
What part of speech is hit the accelerator?
Hit the accelerator is a verb.
What is the past tense of hit the accelerator?
The past tense of hit the accelerator is hit the accelerator.

Words near hit the accelerator in the dictionary

  1. hit someone when they were down
  2. hit squad
  3. hit squads
  4. hit test
  5. hit tests
  6. hit the accelerator
  7. hit the ball twice
  8. hit the big time
  9. hit the board
  10. hit the books
  11. hit the bottle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hit the accelerator (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: “hit the accelerator.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hit_the_accelerator. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.