Word.ws English Dictionary

out of step

out of step prepositional phrase: not matching the movement of one's feet with that of others, or with an accompanying beat, while marching or walking.

Prepositional phrase

  1. Not matching the movement of one's feet with that of others, or with an accompanying beat, while marching or walking.
    • At the march-past, little Johnny was out of step with everyone else.
    • The soldiers […] marched out of step in spite of the drum-beat, […]1940, Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, Penguin, published 1977, Part 1, Chapter 4, pp. 51-52
  2. (figuratively) Not matching or in agreement (with someone or something).
    • The government is increasingly out of step with public opinion.
    • If, now and then, during their travels, they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to.1920, Edith Wharton, chapter 21, in The Age of Innocence, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC, book II, pages 207–208
    Synonyms:
    out of tune

out of step meaning in Malayalam

out of step in Malayalam

at variance, at odds, in disagreement
ക്രമരഹിതമായി, ചേരാതെ, ചേർച്ചയില്ലാതെ, അസമമായി, വ്യത്യാസമായി, യോജിപ്പില്ലാതെ

Examples of out of step in a sentence

  • What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life.1930, Dashiell Hammet, chapter 7, in The Maltese Falcon, New York, N.Y.; London: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →OCLC, pages 77–78:
  • But his old, cold war mindset is out of step with a changing world[.]2023 February 26, Simon Tisdall, “Outdated and out of time: Biden’s crusade for global democracy is doomed to fail”, in The Observer, →ISSN:

Synonyms of out of step

Antonyms

Questions about out of step

What does out of step mean?
Out of step means not matching the movement of one's feet with that of others, or with an accompanying beat, while marching or walking.
What is out of step in Malayalam?
Out of step in Malayalam is ക്രമരഹിതമായി, ചേരാതെ, ചേർച്ചയില്ലാതെ. See Out of step meaning in Malayalam.
How do you use out of step in a sentence?
What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life.
What part of speech is out of step?
Out of step is a prepositional phrase.

Words near out of step in the dictionary

  1. out of sorts
  2. out of spirits
  3. out of spoons
  4. out of square
  5. out of station
  6. out of step
  7. out of stock
  8. out of suits
  9. out of suits with
  10. out of sync
  11. out of temper

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: out of step (page history and authors); out of step (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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: “out of step.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/out_of_step. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.