Word.ws English Dictionary

passes for

passes for is the third-person singular simple present indicative of pass for.

Meaning of pass for

Verb

pass for (third-person singular simple present passes for, present participle passing for, simple past and past participle passed for)

  1. (transitive) To be mistakenly seen as something that one is not
    • When I visited the offices in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge.2006, The New Yorker, archived from the original on 05 Dec 2012
  2. (transitive) To be sufficient, especially minimally so, for a specified purpose.

Questions about passes for

What is passes for the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Passes for is the third-person singular simple present indicative of pass for.

Words near passes for in the dictionary

  1. passes as
  2. passes away
  3. passes by
  4. passes current
  5. passes down
  6. passes for
  7. passes gas
  8. passes in one's checks
  9. passes judgment
  10. passes motion
  11. passes muster

Source and license

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