Word.ws English Dictionary

look in on

look in on verb: to check that (someone or something) is okay or that a process is continuing appropriately; to check up on; to monitor (someone) through brief, often surreptitious checks.

Verb

look in on (third-person singular simple present looks in on, present participle looking in on, simple past and past participle looked in on)

  1. To check that (someone or something) is okay or that a process is continuing appropriately; to check up on; to monitor (someone) through brief, often surreptitious checks.
    • Atticus would flee to his office directly after dinner, where if we sometimes looked in on him, we would find him sitting back in his swivel chair reading.1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC

Forms of look in on

third-person singular presentlooks in on
present participlelooking in on
past participlelooked in on
pastlooked in on

Questions about look in on

What does look in on mean?
Look in on means to check that (someone or something) is okay or that a process is continuing appropriately; to check up on; to monitor (someone) through brief, often surreptitious checks.
What part of speech is look in on?
Look in on is a verb.
What is the past tense of look in on?
The past tense of look in on is looked in on.

Words near look in on in the dictionary

  1. look forward to
  2. look fun
  3. look funn
  4. look here
  5. look in
  6. look in on
  7. look in the face
  8. look into
  9. look it
  10. look like
  11. look like a bomb has hit it

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: look in on (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: “look in on.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/look_in_on. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.