pull up the drawbridge
pull up the drawbridge verb: to stop allowing people to join or enter; to follow a policy of isolationism.
Verb
pull up the drawbridge (third-person singular simple present pulls up the drawbridge, present participle pulling up the drawbridge, simple past and past participle pulled up the drawbridge)
- To stop allowing people to join or enter; to follow a policy of isolationism.
- Near-synonym: pull up the ladder
- The impact of migration on the economy and on social provision is the key area of contest between those who support more or less unfettered movement of labour and those who want to pull up the drawbridge.2007, Toby Shelley, Exploited: Migrant Labour in the New Global Economy, page 121
- Synonyms:
- pull up the ladder
Synonyms of pull up the drawbridge
Forms of pull up the drawbridge
| third-person singular present | pulls up the drawbridge |
|---|---|
| present participle | pulling up the drawbridge |
| past participle | pulled up the drawbridge |
| past | pulled up the drawbridge |
Questions about pull up the drawbridge
- What does pull up the drawbridge mean?
- Pull up the drawbridge means to stop allowing people to join or enter; to follow a policy of isolationism.
- What part of speech is pull up the drawbridge?
- Pull up the drawbridge is a verb.
- What is the past tense of pull up the drawbridge?
- The past tense of pull up the drawbridge is pulled up the drawbridge.
Words near pull up the drawbridge in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pull up the drawbridge (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:
Cite this entry: “pull up the drawbridge.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pull_up_the_drawbridge. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.