Word.ws English Dictionary

pulling out of the hat

pulling out of the hat is the present participle of pull out of the hat.

Meaning of pull out of the hat

Verb

pull out of the hat (third-person singular simple present pulls out of the hat, present participle pulling out of the hat, simple past and past participle pulled out of the hat)

  1. (idiomatic) To select at random, or seemingly at random.
    • Having spent more than £500,000 on players last summer, Crawley can hardly be classed as minnows but they have still punched way above their weight and this kind of performance means no-one will relish pulling them out of the hat in Sunday's draw.2011 January 29, Chris Bevan, “Torquay 0 - 1 Crawley Town”, in BBC

Questions about pulling out of the hat

What is pulling out of the hat the present participle of?
Pulling out of the hat is the present participle of pull out of the hat.

Words near pulling out of the hat in the dictionary

  1. pulling out of a hat
  2. pulling out of one's arse
  3. pulling out of one's ass
  4. pulling out of the bag
  5. pulling out of the fire
  6. pulling out of the hat
  7. pulling over
  8. pulling power
  9. pulling punches
  10. pulling rank
  11. pulling round

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pulling out of the hat (page history and authors); pull out of the hat (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: “pulling out of the hat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pulling_out_of_the_hat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.