Word.ws English Dictionary

hung back

hung back is the simple past and past participle of hang back.

Meaning of hang back

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

Questions about hung back

What is hung back the simple past and past participle of?
Hung back is the simple past and past participle of hang back.

Words near hung back in the dictionary

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

Source and license

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