Word.ws English Dictionary

laughing off

laughing off is the present participle and gerund of laugh off.

Meaning of laugh off

Verb

laugh off (third-person singular simple present laughs off, present participle laughing off, simple past and past participle laughed off)

  1. (transitive) To respond to (a negative situation) lightheartedly, as though it were a joke.
    • […] The landowner, Gennaro Matrone, had a hunch that these were the remains of Pliny the Elder (the Younger wrote of his uncle’s body lying as if asleep on the day after the eruption), but his theory was laughed off in the press.2020 February 14, Franz Lidz, “Here Lies the Skull of Pliny the Elder, Maybe”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 02 Jul...
    Synonyms:
    laugh away

Questions about laughing off

What is laughing off the present participle and gerund of?
Laughing off is the present participle and gerund of laugh off.

Words near laughing off in the dictionary

  1. laughing jackasses
  2. laughing juice
  3. laughing kookaburra
  4. laughing kookaburras
  5. laughing like a drain
  6. laughing off
  7. laughing on the other side of one's face
  8. laughing on the wrong side of one's face
  9. laughing on the wrong side of one's mouth
  10. laughing one's ass off
  11. laughing one's head off

Source and license

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