Word.ws English Dictionary

ponteng

ponteng verb: to skip (school or work); play truant.

Verb

ponteng (third-person singular simple present pontengs, present participle pontenging, simple past and past participle pontenged)

  1. (Manglish, Singlish) To skip (school or work); play truant.
    • […] she rushed up to me at the end shouting: "Hei you came! Did you ponteng work?"
      I do not advocated "pontenging" of course but I do strongly recommend one primary school sports meet at least for each parent and soon.1978, Adibah Amin, As I was Passing, volume 2, page 197
    • But that was the best place to spend the day if you pontenged school. It was so cool and quiet.Quoted in 2009, Rosaly Puthucheary, Different Voices: The Singaporean/Malaysian Novel (page 124)

Forms of ponteng

third-person singular presentpontengs
present participlepontenging
past participlepontenged
pastpontenged

Origin of ponteng

Unadapted borrowing from Malay ponteng.

Words formed from ponteng

Questions about ponteng

What does ponteng mean?
Ponteng means to skip (school or work); play truant.
What part of speech is ponteng?
Ponteng is a verb.
What is the past tense of ponteng?
The past tense of ponteng is pontenged.

Words near ponteng in the dictionary

  1. Ponteilla
  2. Ponteix
  3. Ponteland
  4. pontellid
  5. pontellids
  6. ponteng
  7. pontenged
  8. pontenging
  9. pontengs
  10. Pontenure
  11. pontes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ponteng (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: “ponteng.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ponteng. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.