Word.ws English Dictionary

hitting the accelerator

hitting the accelerator is the present participle and gerund of hit the accelerator.

Meaning of hit the accelerator

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

Questions about hitting the accelerator

What is hitting the accelerator the present participle and gerund of?
Hitting the accelerator is the present participle and gerund of hit the accelerator.

Words near hitting the accelerator in the dictionary

  1. hitting paydirt
  2. hitting rock bottom
  3. hitting send
  4. hitting someone for six
  5. hitting someone when they are down
  6. hitting the accelerator
  7. hitting the big time
  8. hitting the board
  9. hitting the books
  10. hitting the bottle
  11. hitting the bricks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hitting the accelerator (page history and authors); 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: “hitting the accelerator.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hitting_the_accelerator. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.