quiet quit
quiet quit verb: to cease overachieving at one's workplace to focus on one's personal life; to do only what is reasonably or contractually required.
Verb
quiet quit (third-person singular simple present quiet quits, present participle quiet quitting, simple past and past participle quiet quit or quiet quitted)
- To cease overachieving at one's workplace to focus on one's personal life; to do only what is reasonably or contractually required.
- Near-synonym: work to rule
- He said that he is going to quiet quit his job because he wants to focus on his family.
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see quiet, quit.
Examples of quiet quit in a sentence
- Emma O'Brien, 31, from London quiet quit from her job as a personal assistant within the retail sector, after also being turned down for a pay rise.2022 August 31, Perisha Kudhail, “Quiet quitting: The workplace trend taking over TikTok”, in BBC News, archived from the original on 01...
- Instead of managers worrying about quiet quitting, I think they should take away one lesson: Don't rely so heavily on employees going above and beyond their job description.2022 October 3, Sarah Green Carmichael, “Don’t quit quiet: work quiet and quit loud”, in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, page A14:
- “I’m quiet quitting dinner,” I told people I barely knew.2025 October 12, Erin O. White, “Why I Had to Kill Family Dinner”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company...
Forms of quiet quit
| third-person singular present | quiet quits |
|---|---|
| present participle | quiet quitting |
| past participle | quiet quit |
| past | quiet quit |
| past participle | quiet quitted |
| past | quiet quitted |
| alternative form | quiet-quit |
Origin of quiet quit
Back-formation from quiet quitting.
Words formed from quiet quit
Questions about quiet quit
- What does quiet quit mean?
- Quiet quit means to cease overachieving at one's workplace to focus on one's personal life; to do only what is reasonably or contractually required.
- How do you use quiet quit in a sentence?
- Emma O'Brien, 31, from London quiet quit from her job as a personal assistant within the retail sector, after also being turned down for a pay rise.
- What part of speech is quiet quit?
- Quiet quit is a verb.
- What is the past tense of quiet quit?
- The past tense of quiet quit is quiet quit.
Words near quiet quit in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: quiet quit (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: “quiet quit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quiet_quit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.