Word.ws English Dictionary

roll back the years

roll back the years verb: to produce a sense of nostalgia.

Verb

roll back the years (third-person singular simple present rolls back the years, present participle rolling back the years, simple past and past participle rolled back the years)

  1. (idiomatic) To produce a sense of nostalgia.
  2. (idiomatic) To demonstrate a performance later in life as good as in one's prime.
    • Pires, a three-time Cup winner with Arsenal who scored the Gunners' winner against Southampton in the 2003 final, has been a largely peripheral figure at Villa Park since joining in November - but the 37-year-old rolled back the years with a fine finish from Delfouneso's knockdown.2011 January 29, Chris Bevan, “Aston Villa 3 - 1 Blackburn”, in BBC

Forms of roll back the years

third-person singular presentrolls back the years
present participlerolling back the years
past participlerolled back the years
pastrolled back the years

Questions about roll back the years

What does roll back the years mean?
Roll back the years means to produce a sense of nostalgia.
What part of speech is roll back the years?
Roll back the years is a verb.
What is the past tense of roll back the years?
The past tense of roll back the years is rolled back the years.

Words near roll back the years in the dictionary

  1. roll
  2. roll about
  3. roll around
  4. roll away
  5. roll back
  6. roll back the years
  7. roll bar
  8. roll bars
  9. roll cage
  10. roll cages
  11. roll call

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: roll back the years (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-roll back the years.ogg.

Cite this entry: “roll back the years.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/roll_back_the_years. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.