Word.ws English Dictionary

hitting the books

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

Meaning of hit the books

Verb

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

  1. (Australia, US, figuratively, informal) To study, especially with particular intensity.
    • They go to the beach when they should be hitting the books and then they wonder why they get bad grades.

Questions about hitting the books

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

Words near hitting the books in the dictionary

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

Source and license

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