Word.ws English Dictionary

on the safe side

on the safe side prepositional phrase: taking precautions.

Prepositional phrase

  1. Taking precautions.
    • Just to be on the safe side, why don't you Google him?
    • Oh, no, my dear, I ordered that six months ago, just to be on the safe side. But upon my soul, I was sure then that we'd be on board to-day.c. 1921 (date written), Karel Čapek, translated by Paul Selver, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama […], Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1923, →OCLC, Act...

Questions about on the safe side

What does on the safe side mean?
On the safe side means taking precautions.
What part of speech is on the safe side?
On the safe side is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on the safe side in the dictionary

  1. on the road
  2. on the rob
  3. on the rocks
  4. on the ropes
  5. on the run
  6. on the safe side
  7. on the same page
  8. on the same wavelength
  9. on the sauce
  10. on the scene
  11. on the scoot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on the safe side (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: “on the safe side.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/on_the_safe_side. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.