Word.ws English Dictionary

pat-down

pat-down is the alternative form of patdown.

Meaning of patdown

Noun

patdown (plural patdowns)

  1. (US, informal) An act of patting somebody's clothes to check for concealed weapons, etc.
    • To avoid such charges, airline screeners moved to random processes that led to patdowns of congressional representatives and mild-mannered elderly women...2006, Yoram Wind, Colin Crook, Robert E. Gunther, The power of impossible thinking
    Synonyms:
    frisk, frisking

Forms of pat-down

pluralpat-downs

Questions about pat-down

What is pat-down the alternative form of?
Pat-down is the alternative form of patdown.

Words near pat-down in the dictionary

  1. pat on the back
  2. pat slide
  3. pat slides
  4. PAT testing
  5. pat-a-cake
  6. pat-down
  7. pat-downs
  8. pat-on-the-back
  9. pat. off.
  10. pat. pend.
  11. pata

Source and license

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