Word.ws English Dictionary

rake over

rake over verb: to discuss something unpleasant from the past.

Verb

rake over (third-person singular simple present rakes over, present participle raking over, simple past and past participle raked over)

  1. (idiomatic) To discuss something unpleasant from the past.
    • Tristam Darling [the narrator character] describes Florence by saying, among other things, "She had no bosom, a deficiency I always thought in a woman like a bed without a pillow."(!) Gordon [the author] rakes over every female character in the book in a similar way. No woman is treated positively...1979 April 28, Flame B. James, “Still Private”, in Gay Community News, page 14

Forms of rake over

third-person singular presentrakes over
present participleraking over
past participleraked over
pastraked over

Questions about rake over

What does rake over mean?
Rake over means to discuss something unpleasant from the past.
What part of speech is rake over?
Rake over is a verb.
What is the past tense of rake over?
The past tense of rake over is raked over.

Words near rake over in the dictionary

  1. rake and scrape
  2. rake in
  3. rake it in
  4. rake off
  5. rake out
  6. rake over
  7. rake over old coals
  8. rake over the coals
  9. rake receiver
  10. rake receivers
  11. rake stepping

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rake over (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-rake over.ogg.

Cite this entry: “rake over.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rake_over. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.