pull rank
pull rank verb: to assert one's authority over a subordinate who disagrees.
Verb
pull rank (third-person singular simple present pulls rank, present participle pulling rank, simple past and past participle pulled rank)
- To assert one's authority over a subordinate who disagrees.
- Graduate schools teach students to use footnotes as authorities — barriers to anyone's questioning the author's conclusions. Professionalism then becomes a matter of pulling rank: the person who has the most footnotes has the last say.1980 February 9, Charley Shively, “Radical History: Not Radical Enough”, in Gay Community News, volume 7, number 28, page 12
- And don't try pulling rank again: your answer, not your age, will determine your fate!2004, Intelligent Systems, translated by Nintendo of America, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Nintendo, GameCube, level/area: The Great Tree
Forms of pull rank
| third-person singular present | pulls rank |
|---|---|
| present participle | pulling rank |
| past participle | pulled rank |
| past | pulled rank |
Questions about pull rank
- What does pull rank mean?
- Pull rank means to assert one's authority over a subordinate who disagrees.
- What part of speech is pull rank?
- Pull rank is a verb.
- What is the past tense of pull rank?
- The past tense of pull rank is pulled rank.
Words near pull rank in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pull rank (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-pull rank.ogg.
Cite this entry: “pull rank.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pull_rank. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.