Word.ws English Dictionary

playing with

playing with is the present participle and gerund of play with.

Meaning of play with

Verb

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

  1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: play with.
    • The boy was playing with his toys.
  2. (transitive) To fiddle with; make small adjustments to, for example to something mechanical in order to improve its performance.
  3. (transitive) To trick.
    • Breaking into the right side of Wolves' penalty area, he played with Elokobi over and over while ignoring both Dimitar Berbatov and Wayne Rooney as they lurked in the centre with arms aloft.2011 February 5, Chris Whyatt, “Wolverhampton 2-1 Man Utd”, in BBC
  4. (transitive) To sexually stimulate (a person or a person's erogenous zone).
    • She laughed and started to play with me. I started getting hard and really got turned on. I liked her giving me all the attention. I begged her to suck my cock. I was ready to explode. She went down on me and I had a terrific orgasm.1992, Patrick Suraci, Male sexual armor, page 169

Questions about playing with

What is playing with the present participle and gerund of?
Playing with is the present participle and gerund of play with.

Words near playing with in the dictionary

  1. playing up
  2. playing up Old Gooseberry
  3. playing up to
  4. playing upon
  5. playing well with others
  6. playing with
  7. playing with a full deck
  8. playing with edge-tools
  9. playing with edged tools
  10. playing with fire
  11. playing with house money

Source and license

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