Word.ws English Dictionary

rake-stepping

rake-stepping noun: the act of repeatedly making damaging and avoidable mistakes.

Noun

rake-stepping (countable and uncountable, plural rake-steppings)

  1. (slang) The act of repeatedly making damaging and avoidable mistakes.
    • But the rake-stepping won’t stop, and the attacks won’t go away, raising the question of whether there will come a tipping point for Biden.2019 August 13, Tina Nguyen, “Biden Advisers Worry the Gaffes Are Becoming a Problem”, in Vanity Fair
    • And despite occasional attempts at reform, usually in response to some epic rake-stepping by the agency, federal disaster relief has gotten no simpler or more effective.2023 September 12, Mark Gongloff, FEMA Isn’t Ready for Our New Age of Climate Disasters, Bloomberg

Forms of rake-stepping

pluralrake-steppings
alternative formrake stepping

Origin of rake-stepping

Popularized by a gag in the 1993 episode "Cape Feare" of The Simpsons, in which Sideshow Bob, already injured, accidentally steps on several rakes, causing the handles to hit him in the face.

Questions about rake-stepping

What does rake-stepping mean?
Rake-stepping means the act of repeatedly making damaging and avoidable mistakes.
What part of speech is rake-stepping?
Rake-stepping is a noun.
What is the plural of rake-stepping?
The plural of rake-stepping is rake-steppings.

Words near rake-stepping in the dictionary

  1. rake-hells
  2. rake-helly
  3. rake-n-scrape
  4. rake-off
  5. rake-offs
  6. rake-stepping
  7. rake-steppings
  8. rakeable
  9. rakeback
  10. rakebacks
  11. raked

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rake-stepping (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: “rake-stepping.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rake-stepping. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.