Word.ws English Dictionary

making sense

making sense is the present participle and gerund of make sense.

Meaning of make sense

Verb

make sense (third-person singular simple present makes sense, present participle making sense, simple past and past participle made sense)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To be sensible, coherent, reasonable.
    • The thing doesn’t make sense to me.
  2. (idiomatic, intransitive, with-of) To decipher or understand.
    • Can you make sense of her handwriting?
  3. (informal) Used to express interest or desire in something; to be pleasing or beneficial; to work, be operative, or be advantageous to.
    • Maybe we should take a break. I mean, our relationship just isn't making much sense anymore.
  4. (slang, generally negated) To be in the realm of the ordinary, to be not particularly developed.
    • If you want to grow spinal erectors that don’t make sense, you have to do a lot of bent-over compound lifts.
    Antonyms:
    ridiculous, absurd

Questions about making sense

What is making sense the present participle and gerund of?
Making sense is the present participle and gerund of make sense.

Words near making sense in the dictionary

  1. making pigs and whistles of something
  2. making pretend
  3. making quick work of
  4. making right
  5. making room
  6. making sense
  7. making shift
  8. making shit of
  9. making shit shake
  10. making short work of
  11. making some noise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: making sense (page history and authors); make sense (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: “making sense.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/making_sense. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.