Word.ws English Dictionary

numbing out

numbing out is the present participle and gerund of numb out.

Meaning of numb out

Verb

numb out (third-person singular simple present numbs out, present participle numbing out, simple past and past participle numbed out)

  1. (intransitive) To make oneself numb, especially emotionally.
    • Because in childhood there is no opportunity to express this pain in a way that helps a survivor heal, s/he learns to numb out by necessity. Of course, different people numb out in different ways. The survivors I interviewed became alcoholics and drug addicts, some ate compulsively, […]1991 December 8, Liz Galst, “Gay Male Incest Survivors, Safer Sex, and AIDS”, in Gay Community News, volume 19, number 21, page 9
  2. (transitive) To block or alleviate (pain, etc.) by inducing numbness.

Questions about numbing out

What is numbing out the present participle and gerund of?
Numbing out is the present participle and gerund of numb out.

Words near numbing out in the dictionary

  1. numbfish
  2. numbfishes
  3. numbhead
  4. numbheads
  5. numbing
  6. numbing out
  7. numbingly
  8. numbingness
  9. numbish
  10. Numbla Vale
  11. numbles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: numbing out (page history and authors); numb out (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: “numbing out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/numbing_out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.