Word.ws English Dictionary

pulling rank

pulling rank is the present participle and gerund 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 pulling rank

What is pulling rank the present participle and gerund of?
Pulling rank is the present participle and gerund of pull rank.

Words near pulling rank in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pulling 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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