Word.ws English Dictionary

played for time

played for time is the simple past and past participle of play for time.

Meaning of play for time

Verb

play for time (third-person singular simple present plays for time, present participle playing for time, simple past and past participle played for time)

  1. (idiomatic) To delay a situation until one is prepared.
    • Two cheers for that, at best. The original six party talks ran, or rather crawled, from 2003 to 2008. It remains unclear if North Korea was ever serious – or just playing for time while working on HEU.29 February 2012, Aidan Foster-Carter, BBC News, “North Korea: The denuclearisation dance resumes”
    Synonyms:
    buy time

Questions about played for time

What is played for time the simple past and past participle of?
Played for time is the simple past and past participle of play for time.

Words near played for time in the dictionary

  1. played fast and loose
  2. played favorites
  3. played fine
  4. played first fiddle
  5. played for love
  6. played for time
  7. played full
  8. played games
  9. played God
  10. played gooseberry
  11. played hardball

Source and license

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