Word.ws English Dictionary

outfacing

outfacing is the present participle and gerund of outface.

Meaning of outface

Verb

outface (third-person singular simple present outfaces, present participle outfacing, simple past and past participle outfaced)

  1. (transitive) To disconcert someone with an unblinking face-to-face confrontation; to stare down; to withsay
    • Thou maiſt I warrant, we ſhall haue old ſwearing / That they did giue the Rings away to men, / But weele out-face them, and out-ſweare them too, [...]c. 1596–1598 (date written), W[illiam] Shakespeare, The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. […] (First Quarto), [London]: […] J[ames] Roberts [for Thomas Heyes], published 1600, →OCLC, [Act...
  2. (transitive) To boldly confront a situation.
    • Quiet people too, for I think that about this time a sort of remorseful tenderness comes over the bullies and the nagsters, so that they go about gently and deprecatingly, hoping by one day's record sweetness to outface the year's blusterings.1906, Violet Hunt, The Workaday Woman, page 1

Questions about outfacing

What is outfacing the present participle and gerund of?
Outfacing is the present participle and gerund of outface.

Words near outfacing in the dictionary

  1. outfables
  2. outfabling
  3. outface
  4. outfaced
  5. outfaces
  6. outfacing
  7. outfake
  8. outfall
  9. outfallen
  10. outfalling
  11. outfalls

Source and license

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