Word.ws English Dictionary

pull away

pull away verb: to move ahead.

Verb

pull away (third-person singular simple present pulls away, present participle pulling away, simple past and past participle pulled away)

  1. (idiomatic) To move ahead.
    • Schumacher is beginning to pull away from the rest of the racers.
    • San Francisco is a city built on hills that look, to the driver of an ailing vintage VW, like they go straight up endlessly. At the beginning of our trip my sother couldn't pull away from a light if the car was on the slightest backward incline.1980 February 16, Nancy Walker, “You Can Go Home Again”, in Gay Community News, volume 7, number 29, archived from the original on 05 Aug 2026, page 12
  2. (transitive) To move oneself further from a target, either literally or figuratively
    • She pulled away from me when I approached her.
    • We used to be close, but Paul has been pulling away from me for years.

Forms of pull away

third-person singular presentpulls away
present participlepulling away
past participlepulled away
pastpulled away

Questions about pull away

What does pull away mean?
Pull away means to move ahead.
What part of speech is pull away?
Pull away is a verb.
What is the past tense of pull away?
The past tense of pull away is pulled away.

Words near pull away in the dictionary

  1. pull an oar
  2. pull apart
  3. pull aside
  4. pull at someone's heart strings
  5. pull at someone's heartstrings
  6. pull away
  7. pull away the shoulder
  8. pull back
  9. pull back the curtain
  10. pull buoy
  11. pull buoys

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pull away (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-pull away.ogg.

Cite this entry: “pull away.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pull_away. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.