seat-of-the-pants
seat-of-the-pants adjective: done by feel, guess, or trial and error rather than by careful planning, thought or technique.
Adjective
seat-of-the-pants (not comparable)
- Done by feel, guess, or trial and error rather than by careful planning, thought or technique.
- The new pension-fund managers are an eclectic group, displaying a spectrum of styles and strategies. Some rely chiefly on computers and charts, while others are more likely to trust their seat-of-the-pants judgment.1984 January 9, Charles Alexander, Frederick Ungeheuer, “The Billion-Dollar Boys”, in Time
Origin of seat-of-the-pants
From seat + of + the + pants.
Questions about seat-of-the-pants
- What does seat-of-the-pants mean?
- Seat-of-the-pants means done by feel, guess, or trial and error rather than by careful planning, thought or technique.
- What part of speech is seat-of-the-pants?
- Seat-of-the-pants is an adjective.
Words near seat-of-the-pants in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: seat-of-the-pants (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-seat-of-the-pants.ogg.
Cite this entry: “seat-of-the-pants.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/seat-of-the-pants. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.