Word.ws English Dictionary

paint the town red

paint the town red verb: to party or celebrate in a rowdy, wild manner, especially in a public place.

Verb

paint the town red (third-person singular simple present paints the town red, present participle painting the town red, simple past and past participle painted the town red)

  1. (idiomatic) To party or celebrate in a rowdy, wild manner, especially in a public place.
    • It was the end of term and students decided to celebrate by painting the town red.
    • With regard to Mrs. Brown-Potter, as acting is no longer considered absolutely essential for success on the English stage, there is really no reason why the pretty bright-eyed lady who charmed us all last June by her merry laugh and her nonchalant ways, should not—to borrow an expression from her...1887 March, Oscar Wilde, The American Invasion

paint the town red meaning in Malayalam and Vietnamese

paint the town red in Malayalam

have a good time, have a wild time, celebrate
അർമ്മാദിക്കുക, ആർഭാടപൂർവ്വം ആഘോഷിക്കുക, കേമമായി ആസ്വദിക്കുക, ആനന്ദിക്കുക, ബഹളമയമായി ആഘോഷിക്കുക, ആഘോഷിക്കുക

paint the town red in Vietnamese

party in a rowdy, wild manner
đi bão

Examples of paint the town red in a sentence

  • Plainly they were advertising the fact that they had come to paint the town red and did not care who knew it.1919, William MacLeod Raine, chapter 8, in A Man Four-Square:
  • Bitch, I said what I said / I'd rather be famous instead / I let all that get to my head / I don't care, I paint the town red2023, “Paint The Town Red”, in Scarlet, performed by Doja Cat:

Forms of paint the town red

third-person singular presentpaints the town red
present participlepainting the town red
past participlepainted the town red
pastpainted the town red
alternative formpaint the town

Origin of paint the town red

US slang. Earliest known use 1884. Various theories include the red from bonfires, the heat from over-stoked paddle-wheel boilers, and town demarcation lines in the Wild West. A British claim attributing it to the actions of the Third Marquess of Waterford predates the first known use by decades.

Questions about paint the town red

What does paint the town red mean?
Paint the town red means to party or celebrate in a rowdy, wild manner, especially in a public place.
What is paint the town red in Malayalam?
Paint the town red in Malayalam is അർമ്മാദിക്കുക, ആർഭാടപൂർവ്വം ആഘോഷിക്കുക, കേമമായി ആസ്വദിക്കുക. See Paint the town red meaning in Malayalam.
How do you use paint the town red in a sentence?
Plainly they were advertising the fact that they had come to paint the town red and did not care who knew it.
What part of speech is paint the town red?
Paint the town red is a verb.
What is the past tense of paint the town red?
The past tense of paint the town red is painted the town red.

Words near paint the town red in the dictionary

  1. paint shops
  2. paint stripper
  3. paint strippers
  4. paint the tape
  5. paint the town
  6. paint the town red
  7. paint the wagon
  8. paint thinner
  9. paint thinners
  10. paint up
  11. paint with a broad brush

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paint the town red (page history and authors); paint the town red (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-paint the town red.wav.

Cite this entry: “paint the town red.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/paint_the_town_red. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.