Word.ws English Dictionary

passing for

passing for is the present participle and gerund 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 passing for

What is passing for the present participle and gerund of?
Passing for is the present participle and gerund of pass for.

Words near passing for in the dictionary

  1. passing bell
  2. passing bells
  3. passing by
  4. passing current
  5. passing down
  6. passing for
  7. passing game
  8. passing games
  9. passing gas
  10. passing grade
  11. passing grades

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: passing 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: “passing for.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/passing_for. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.