Word.ws English Dictionary

put someone on to

put someone on to verb: to show; to draw someone's attention to something useful or interesting.

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To show; to draw someone's attention to something useful or interesting.
    • O.D.'d, the coroner said. But Meg thought there was more to it. And there was. Much more. Thinking this might be a lead, Meg's friend Joanna, a lesbian and a prostitute, put her on to a bar called Kinky's. Kinky's is where pre-pubescent girls got recruited for kiddy porn films and working the...1989 May 6, Liz Galst, “Meet Meg Lacey, Private Heat”, in Gay Community News, page 7
    • College put him on to jazz, and he worshipped at the altar of Coltrane and Davis.2020 January 8, Jenny Stevens, “Doors drummer John Densmore: 'It took me years to forgive Jim Morrison'”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC...
    Antonyms:
    put off

Antonyms of put someone on to

Forms of put someone on to

third-person singular presentputs someone on to
present participleputting someone on to
past participleput someone on to
pastput someone on to
alternative formput someone onto

Questions about put someone on to

What does put someone on to mean?
Put someone on to means to show; to draw someone's attention to something useful or interesting.
What part of speech is put someone on to?
Put someone on to is a verb.
What is the past tense of put someone on to?
The past tense of put someone on to is put someone on to.

Words near put someone on to in the dictionary

  1. put someone in mind of
  2. put someone in their place
  3. put someone on blast
  4. put someone on game
  5. put someone on ice
  6. put someone on to
  7. put someone out of their misery
  8. put someone through their paces
  9. put someone to their trumps
  10. put someone under the screw
  11. put someone wise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: put someone on to (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: “put someone on to.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/put_someone_on_to. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.