Word.ws English Dictionary

pick up what someone is putting down

pick up what someone is putting down verb: to understand, pay attention to, or learn from what someone says or does.

Verb

pick up what someone is putting down (third-person singular simple present picks up what someone is putting down, present participle picking up what someone is putting down, simple past and past participle picked up what someone was putting down)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To understand, pay attention to, or learn from what someone says or does.
    • Moran, picking up what Jennings is putting down, agrees.2004 November 2, Melanie McFarland, “TV anchors keep to their word”, in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, retrieved 24 May 2014
    • If we are serious about putting the party of Lincoln back on track, we had better begin to pick up what black folk are putting down.2008, Joseph C. Phillips, He Talk Like a White Boy, →ISBN, page 278, →ISBN

Synonyms of pick up what someone is putting down

Forms of pick up what someone is putting down

third-person singular presentpicks up what someone is putting down
present participlepicking up what someone is putting down
past participlepicked up what someone was putting down
pastpicked up what someone was putting down

Questions about pick up what someone is putting down

What does pick up what someone is putting down mean?
Pick up what someone is putting down means to understand, pay attention to, or learn from what someone says or does.
What part of speech is pick up what someone is putting down?
Pick up what someone is putting down is a verb.
What is the past tense of pick up what someone is putting down?
The past tense of pick up what someone is putting down is picked up what someone was putting down.

Words near pick up what someone is putting down in the dictionary

  1. pick up the threads
  2. pick up the threads of
  3. pick up truck
  4. pick up trucks
  5. pick up what someone is laying down
  6. pick up what someone is putting down
  7. pick ups
  8. pick your poison
  9. pick'd
  10. pick'em
  11. Pick's disease

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pick up what someone is putting down (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-pick up what someone is putting down.ogg.

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