Word.ws English Dictionary

machine-gun

machine-gun verb: to fire a machine gun.

Verb

machine-gun (third-person singular simple present machine-guns, present participle machine-gunning, simple past and past participle machine-gunned)

  1. To fire a machine gun.
  2. To shoot (people, etc.) with a machine gun.
    • During a time when the New Right is becoming increasingly powerful, when gay people are machine-gunned down in the streets, lesbians and gay men are recognizing the necessity of helping each other out.1980 December 6, “Thank You”, in Gay Community News, volume 8, number 20, page 4
  3. To shoot (something) out of or as if out of a machine gun.
    • The opportunity for examining this historical phenomenon was lost on the producers of Making Sense of the Sixties, as images of rock festivals and tragedies were machine-gunned at the viewer, presumably to recreate a sense of the general confusion (as opposed to the cultural excitement) of the...1991 February 4, Owen Shows, “Start Making Sense”, in Gay Community News, volume 18, number 28, page 16

Forms of machine-gun

third-person singular presentmachine-guns
present participlemachine-gunning
past participlemachine-gunned
pastmachine-gunned

Questions about machine-gun

What does machine-gun mean?
Machine-gun means to fire a machine gun.
What part of speech is machine-gun?
Machine-gun is a verb.
What is the past tense of machine-gun?
The past tense of machine-gun is machine-gunned.

Words near machine-gun in the dictionary

  1. machine washing
  2. machine word
  3. machine words
  4. machine zone
  5. machine zones
  6. machine-gun
  7. machine-gunned
  8. machine-gunner
  9. machine-gunners
  10. machine-gunning
  11. machine-guns

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: machine-gun (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-machine-gun.wav.

Cite this entry: “machine-gun.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/machine-gun. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.