Word.ws English Dictionary

paying a visit

paying a visit is the present participle and gerund of pay a visit.

Meaning of pay a visit

Verb

pay a visit (third-person singular simple present pays a visit, present participle paying a visit, simple past and past participle paid a visit)

  1. (idiomatic) To visit.
    • In the succeeding years I paid many more visits to Scotland; this was made easy even for those of modest means, by that wonderful institution, the "Inverness Tourist." For £3 one could get a ticket from London to Inverness and back with a wide choice of routes, […].1957 July, M. D. Greville, “A Diamond Jubilee of Railway Memories”, in Railway Magazine, page 496
  2. (euphemistic, idiomatic) To go to the toilet.

Questions about paying a visit

What is paying a visit the present participle and gerund of?
Paying a visit is the present participle and gerund of pay a visit.

Words near paying a visit in the dictionary

  1. paygrade
  2. paygrades
  3. payik
  4. payiks
  5. paying
  6. paying a visit
  7. paying attention
  8. paying back
  9. paying back in someone's own coin
  10. paying dearly
  11. paying dividends

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paying a visit (page history and authors); pay a visit (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: “paying a visit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/paying_a_visit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.