Word.ws English Dictionary

on one's knees

on one's knees adjective: kneeling, begging or as if begging.

Adjective

on one's knees (not comparable)

  1. Kneeling, begging or as if begging.
    • For god’s love do not turn away—if you have knowledge. We suppli­ants implore you on our knees.1928, W[illiam] B[utler] Yeats, Sophocles’ King Oedipus: A Version of the Modern Stage, London: Macmillan and Co., […], →OCLC
  2. (figuratively) On the verge of collapse; at the mercy of someone.
    • Hungry Berbatov then converted a Giggs cross for his third before Nani slotted a fifth with Birmingham on their knees.2011 January 22, “Man Utd 5 - 0 Birmingham”, in BBC
    • The accepted view is that at the end of hostilities in 1945, the railways were on their knees.2023 March 8, David Clough, “The long road that led to Beeching”, in RAIL, number 978, page 38

Questions about on one's knees

What does on one's knees mean?
On one's knees means kneeling, begging or as if begging.
What part of speech is on one's knees?
On one's knees is an adjective.

Words near on one's knees in the dictionary

  1. on one's hands and knees
  2. on one's head
  3. on one's high horse
  4. on one's honor
  5. on one's Jack Jones
  6. on one's knees
  7. on one's L's
  8. on one's last legs
  9. on one's lee-lane
  10. on one's legs
  11. on one's lonesome

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on one's knees (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-on one's knees.wav.

Cite this entry: “on one's knees.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/on_one%27s_knees. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.