Word.ws English Dictionary

pound sand

pound sand verb: to engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform.

Verb

pound sand (third-person singular simple present pounds sand, present participle pounding sand, simple past and past participle pounded sand)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform.
    • "Bishop McKillup lives there. He's got only three wives, and they three all put together don’t know enough to pound sand with a mallet, with a receipt on the handle."
      For which striking symbol of imbecility I should have given Jake a good deal of credit, if I had not heard him using it several...1871 January, Everett Chamberlain, “My Christmas at Salt Lake”, in The Lakeside Monthly
  2. (idiomatic, informal) To engage in a futile activity.
    • […] Without men on the ground, we'll be pounding sand."2010, Eric Blehm, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan, HarperCollins, published 2010, →ISBN, page 44
    • He told Shelton we needed to "unleash holy hell." “We're not just going to pound sand,” he added.2011, Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir
  3. (derogatory, idiomatic, slang, dismissal) To go away; get lost; go to hell; to waste one's own time (with some other meaningless task) rather than waste the speaker's time with something equally irritating or pointless.
    • All you do is complain. Why don't you go pound sand up your ass and stop bothering the line staff.
    • "The price to us was going to be $3 million, and we had four months to pay before the Licensing 6.0 deadline. We told Microsoft to go pound sand."2003 March 15, Christopher Koch, “Showdown at the 6.0 Corral”, in CIO

Synonyms of pound sand

Forms of pound sand

third-person singular presentpounds sand
present participlepounding sand
past participlepounded sand
pastpounded sand

Origin of pound sand

First use appears c. 1857 in a poem by the Scottish poet Alexander Smith. Used as an example both of an activity so simple that almost anyone could do it and of an activity so pointless that only a fool would do it.

Questions about pound sand

What does pound sand mean?
Pound sand means to engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform.
What part of speech is pound sand?
Pound sand is a verb.
What is the past tense of pound sand?
The past tense of pound sand is pounded sand.

Words near pound sand in the dictionary

  1. pound party
  2. pound puller
  3. pound pullers
  4. Pound Ridge
  5. pound salt
  6. pound sand
  7. pound sand into a rathole
  8. pound Scots
  9. pound shop
  10. pound shops
  11. pound sign

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pound sand (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-pound sand.ogg.

Cite this entry: “pound sand.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pound_sand. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.