make oneself scarce
make oneself scarce verb: to leave or stay away from a place, especially in order to avoid an encounter.
Verb
make oneself scarce (third-person singular simple present makes oneself scarce, present participle making oneself scarce, simple past and past participle made oneself scarce)
- To leave or stay away from a place, especially in order to avoid an encounter.
- Perhaps I should make myself scarce before he finds any more chores to assign me.
- Piker disappears upstairs to shower, and his dad — a retired corporate executive with a Ph.D. in economics who’s written four books about European Union antitrust law — quickly makes himself scarce. But his mom sticks around.2026 August 9, Josh Eells, “Why Is Everyone Scared of Hasan Piker?”, in Rolling Stone, archived from the original on 10 Aug 2026
Forms of make oneself scarce
| third-person singular present | makes oneself scarce |
|---|---|
| present participle | making oneself scarce |
| past participle | made oneself scarce |
| past | made oneself scarce |
Questions about make oneself scarce
- What does make oneself scarce mean?
- Make oneself scarce means to leave or stay away from a place, especially in order to avoid an encounter.
- What part of speech is make oneself scarce?
- Make oneself scarce is a verb.
- What is the past tense of make oneself scarce?
- The past tense of make oneself scarce is made oneself scarce.
Words near make oneself scarce in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: make oneself scarce (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: “make oneself scarce.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/make_oneself_scarce. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.