Word.ws English Dictionary

O/D

O/D is the abbreviation of overdrive.

O/D is the abbreviation of outdoor.

Meaning of overdrive

Noun

overdrive (countable and uncountable, plural overdrives)

  1. (dated) A gear, on an automobile, higher than the traditional top gear, mainly to allow better fuel economy at highway speeds. In the 21st century, such gears are no longer viewed as "extra" and thus rarely called by this name.
    • Near-synonym: top gear
    Synonyms:
    OD, O/D, O.D., top gear
  2. (figuratively, uncountable) A state of heightened activity.
    • overdrive pacing
    Antonyms:
    low gear
  3. (euphemistic, slang) Freewheeling (driving a vehicle with the transmission in neutral) on downhill stretches to achieve higher fuel economy and/or speed than otherwise. In colloquial registers, ethnically bigoted variants have been common, such as Jewish overdrive (alluding to the stereotype of miserly Jews) or Mexican overdrive or Polish overdrive (alluding to stereotypes of foolishness and poverty).
    • Of course overdrive is forbidden for dump trucks in the quarry because it is unsafe, but unscrupulous workers were found to be using it because of a perverse incentive involving tonnage piece rates.
  4. A gear ratio higher than 1:1: one in which a single revolution of the driving element corresponds to more than one revolution of the driven element.

See all 5 meanings of overdrive

Meaning of outdoor

Adjective

outdoor (not comparable)

  1. Situated in, designed to be used in, or carried on in the open air.
    • A very neat old woman, still in her good outdoor coat and best beehive hat, was sitting at a polished mahogany table on whose surface there were several scored scratches so deep that a triangular piece of the veneer had come cleanly away,[…].1963, Margery Allingham, “Foreword”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC
    Antonyms:
    indoor, inside
  2. Pertaining to charity administered or received away from, or independently from, a workhouse or other institution.
    • Believing social policy should be directed by experts to bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, Benthamites judged the old Poor Law outdoor relief system a recipe for waste and idleness.1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 395

See all 3 meanings of outdoor

Questions about O/D

What is O/D the abbreviation of?
O/D is the abbreviation of overdrive.

Words near O/D in the dictionary

  1. O.P.P.
  2. O.P.P.s
  3. o.s.
  4. O.Z.
  5. o/b/o
  6. O/D
  7. O/O
  8. O/RM
  9. O/W
  10. O/Ws
  11. o11y

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: O/D (page history and authors); overdrive (page history and authors); outdoor (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: “O/D.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/o%2Fd. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.