Word.ws English Dictionary

punishment pass

punishment pass noun: the act of passing a cyclist in a motor vehicle as close as possible in order to intimidate them.

Noun

punishment pass (plural punishment passes)

  1. The act of passing a cyclist in a motor vehicle as close as possible in order to intimidate them.
    • In May 2014, Keith Maddox of Piedmont, Alabama, filmed himself ranting at cyclists he passed in his powerful SUV. […] After passing one cyclist, Maddox videoed himself on his smartphone, saying "I'm going to hurt one of them one of these days, I can't help it." He later gave two cyclists a...2015 April 9, Carlton Reid, Roads Were Not Built for Cars, Island Press, →ISBN, page xvii
    • A driver may believe that s/he is a kind, benevolent person who cares and looks out for people and yet, on almost injuring a cyclist, may react with rage or anger towards that rider, even compounding the near miss with a "punishment pass" by swerving into the rider to teach them a lesson.2017, David Dansky, Clare Morris, “Carsickness: Reconstruing Driving and Cycling”, in Peter Cummins, Harry Procter, David Winter, Nick Reed, editors, Personal Construct Psychology at 60: Papers from...

Forms of punishment pass

pluralpunishment passes

Questions about punishment pass

What does punishment pass mean?
Punishment pass means the act of passing a cyclist in a motor vehicle as close as possible in order to intimidate them.
What part of speech is punishment pass?
Punishment pass is a noun.
What is the plural of punishment pass?
The plural of punishment pass is punishment passes.

Words near punishment pass in the dictionary

  1. punishing
  2. punishingly
  3. punishingness
  4. punishings
  5. punishment
  6. punishment pass
  7. punishmental
  8. punishments
  9. punisht
  10. Punit
  11. punition

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: punishment pass (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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