Word.ws English Dictionary

put out to pasture

put out to pasture verb: to make someone retire, especially due to advancing age.

Verb

put out to pasture (third-person singular simple present puts out to pasture, present participle putting out to pasture, simple past and past participle put out to pasture)

  1. (informal) To make someone retire, especially due to advancing age.
    • They've put John out to pasture and replaced him with someone who's got half his experience.
    • Your institutions were important stepping stones. Now they rot. Continuous revolution goes on and you're not with it with your alcoholic, tawdry, self-indulgent subculture. Put out to pasture your dialectic writers, they deserve a good green one, but the revolution must go on.1978 December 23, anonymous author, “More Angry Young Men”, in Gay Community News, volume 6, number 22, page 2
  2. (informal) To discontinue something.
    • That version of the program has been put out to pasture.
    • The other problem was that the electrical locomotives vibrated, […] The electrical locomotives were put out to pasture, the carriages were adapted, and Electrical Multiple Unit traction was introduced from 1903.2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 119
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see put out, to, pasture.

Synonyms of put out to pasture

Forms of put out to pasture

third-person singular presentputs out to pasture
present participleputting out to pasture
past participleput out to pasture
pastput out to pasture

Origin of put out to pasture

From the practice of putting draft animals too old to work in a pasture.

Questions about put out to pasture

What does put out to pasture mean?
Put out to pasture means to make someone retire, especially due to advancing age.
What part of speech is put out to pasture?
Put out to pasture is a verb.
What is the past tense of put out to pasture?
The past tense of put out to pasture is put out to pasture.

Words near put out to pasture in the dictionary

  1. put out feelers
  2. put out of one's head
  3. put out of one's mind
  4. put out the fire
  5. put out to grass
  6. put out to pasture
  7. put out to sea
  8. put outs
  9. put over
  10. put paid to
  11. put past

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: put out to pasture (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-put out to pasture.ogg.

Cite this entry: “put out to pasture.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/put_out_to_pasture. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.