put-down
/ˈpʊtˌdaʊn/
put-down noun: an insult or barb; a snide or demeaning remark.
Noun
put-down (plural put-downs)
- An insult or barb; a snide or demeaning remark.
- When he called you a know-it-all, he meant it as a put-down.
- But it’s not [Pam] Bondi’s script that matters most. It’s her voice, and the attorney general got the tone of it — the poison in it — just right when she spat those put-downs at those men during her, um, testimony before a House panel last week.2026 February 16, Frank Bruni, “Pam Bondi and the MAGA Brand of Insult Politics”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 16 Feb 2026
- Synonyms:
- burn
Synonyms of put-down
Forms of put-down
| plural | put-downs |
|---|---|
| alternative form | putdown |
Origin of put-down
Deverbal from put down.
Questions about put-down
- What does put-down mean?
- Put-down means an insult or barb; a snide or demeaning remark.
- What part of speech is put-down?
- Put-down is a noun.
- How do you pronounce put-down?
- Put-down is pronounced /ˈpʊtˌdaʊn/.
- What is the plural of put-down?
- The plural of put-down is put-downs.
Words near put-down in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: put-down (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “put-down.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/put-down. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.