Word.ws English Dictionary

let be

let be verb: to not disturb or meddle with; to leave (someone or something) alone (see let it be).

Verb

let be (third-person singular simple present lets be, present participle letting be, simple past and past participle let be)

  1. (transitive) To not disturb or meddle with; to leave (someone or something) alone (see let it be).
    • Will you never let me be?
    • Another answers, ‘Let him be,
      ⁠He loves to make parade of pain,
      ⁠That with his piping he may gain
      The praise that comes to constancy.’1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], “Canto XXI”, in In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 35
  2. (archaic, intransitive) To stop, to stop doing something; to leave off (now used alone, formerly also + infinitive).
    • Let be therefore my vengeaunce to disswade [...].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto V”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  3. Used to assign a value to a symbol.
    • Let f be any real-valued function on I and g be any real-valued function on J.

Forms of let be

third-person singular presentlets be
present participleletting be
past participlelet be
pastlet be

Words formed from let be

Questions about let be

What does let be mean?
Let be means to not disturb or meddle with; to leave (someone or something) alone (see let it be).
What part of speech is let be?
Let be is a verb.
What is the past tense of let be?
The past tense of let be is let be.

Words near let be in the dictionary

  1. let
  2. let a sleeping dog lie
  3. let a thousand flowers bloom
  4. let alone
  5. let along
  6. let be
  7. let blood
  8. let bygones be bygones
  9. let crazy stick its dick in you
  10. let down
  11. let drive

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: let be (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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