Word.ws English Dictionary

idled

idled is the simple past and past participle of idle.

Meaning of idle

Verb

idle (third-person singular simple present idles, present participle idling, simple past and past participle idled)

  1. (transitive) To spend (time) in idleness; to waste; to consume.
    • […] the ne'er-do-anything-at-home who idled his day in immaculate attire and who was banished to Canada on a "remittance," shares his pork and beans with the sourdough, who has scratched rocks and sifted black sand from his infancy.1912, Frederick Arthur Talbot, Making Good in Canada, page 81
  2. (intransitive) To lose or spend time doing nothing, or without being employed in business.
    • to idle in an IRC channel
  3. (intransitive) Of an engine: to run at a slow speed, or out of gear; to tick over.
    • When train heating is in operation the diesel engine is arranged to idle at 550 r.p.m. which is the minimum at which the generator will deliver its full rated output.1960 April, “Type "3" Diesel-Electric Locomotives for the Southern Region”, in Railway Magazine, page 246
  4. (transitive) To cause (an engine) to idle (run at a slow speed, or out of gear).
    • The driver idled his engine until the car finally stalled.
  5. (transitive) To make (workers, students, etc) idle; to leave without work.
    • [L]ayoffs idled 1,900 workers in Ohio and 1,000 in Indiana. At the same time, an Indiana assembly plant recalled 1,200 workers.1955, United States Bureau of Employment Security, Unemployment Insurance Claims, volumes 11-12, page 14

See all 18 meanings of idle

Questions about idled

What is idled the simple past and past participle of?
Idled is the simple past and past participle of idle.

Words near idled in the dictionary

  1. idle time
  2. idle times
  3. idle wheel
  4. idle wheels
  5. idleby
  6. idled
  7. idledom
  8. idleful
  9. idlehead
  10. idleheaded
  11. idleheads

Source and license

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