Word.ws English Dictionary

pulled rank

pulled rank is the simple past and past participle of pull rank.

Meaning of pull rank

Verb

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

  1. 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

Questions about pulled rank

What is pulled rank the simple past and past participle of?
Pulled rank is the simple past and past participle of pull rank.

Words near pulled rank in the dictionary

  1. pulled out of the fire
  2. pulled out of the hat
  3. pulled over
  4. pulled pork
  5. pulled punches
  6. pulled rank
  7. pulled round
  8. pulled short
  9. pulled short up
  10. pulled someone down a peg
  11. pulled someone over the coals

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pulled rank (page history and authors); 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.

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Cite this entry: “pulled rank.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pulled_rank. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.