Word.ws English Dictionary

pare to the bone

pare to the bone verb: to pare down to an extreme degree.

Verb

pare to the bone (third-person singular simple present pares to the bone, present participle paring to the bone, simple past and past participle pared to the bone)

  1. (transitive) To pare down to an extreme degree.
    • Distilling costs were already pared to the bone, and the serious credit crisis in Bordeaux in 1789 first put at risk those houses which were already short of resources.2002, L. M. Cullen, The Brandy Trade Under the Ancien Régime, page 246

Forms of pare to the bone

third-person singular presentpares to the bone
present participleparing to the bone
past participlepared to the bone
pastpared to the bone

Questions about pare to the bone

What does pare to the bone mean?
Pare to the bone means to pare down to an extreme degree.
What part of speech is pare to the bone?
Pare to the bone is a verb.
What is the past tense of pare to the bone?
The past tense of pare to the bone is pared to the bone.

Words near pare to the bone in the dictionary

  1. pardusco
  2. parduscos
  3. pardy
  4. pare
  5. pare down
  6. pare to the bone
  7. Parece Vela
  8. parechesis
  9. parechetic
  10. parechoviral
  11. parechovirus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pare to the bone (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “pare to the bone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pare_to_the_bone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.