Word.ws English Dictionary

pushing back

pushing back is the present participle and gerund of push back.

Meaning of push back

Verb

push back (third-person singular simple present pushes back, present participle pushing back, simple past and past participle pushed back)

  1. To refute or argue against a position or an accusation; to express one's own view on a situation.
    • The scandal is growing legs. We need to start pushing back.
  2. To postpone.
    • The Friday meeting keeps getting pushed back to the following week.
  3. (migration) To summarily expel asylum seekers, especially in violation of the principle of non-refoulement.
    • EU member states have used illegal operations to push back at least 40,000 asylum seekers from Europe’s borders during the pandemic[…]2021 May 5, Lorenzo Tondo, “Revealed: 2,000 refugee deaths linked to illegal EU pushbacks”, in The Guardian
  4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see push, back.

Questions about pushing back

What is pushing back the present participle and gerund of?
Pushing back is the present participle and gerund of push back.

Words near pushing back in the dictionary

  1. pushing along
  2. pushing and shoving
  3. pushing around
  4. pushing aside
  5. pushing away
  6. pushing back
  7. pushing daisies
  8. pushing down
  9. pushing forward
  10. pushing in
  11. pushing into the long grass

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pushing back (page history and authors); push back (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: “pushing back.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pushing_back. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.