Word.ws English Dictionary

select out

select out verb: to fire (an employee).

Verb

select out (third-person singular simple present selects out, present participle selecting out, simple past and past participle selected out)

  1. (US, euphemistic, transitive) To fire (an employee).
    • During the past week employees of grade 13 and above in the Agency for International Development, which is seeking legislation to "select out" employees without regard to civil service laws, received invitations.1967, United States. Congress. Senate. Judiciary, Privacy and the Rights of Federal Employees: Hearings
    • Employees are, of course, never fired. They are selected out, placed out, non-retained, released, dehired, non-renewed.1991, Elvio Angeloni, Annual Editions: Anthropology, 91-92, page 44

Forms of select out

third-person singular presentselects out
present participleselecting out
past participleselected out
pastselected out

Questions about select out

What does select out mean?
Select out means to fire (an employee).
What part of speech is select out?
Select out is a verb.
What is the past tense of select out?
The past tense of select out is selected out.

Words near select out in the dictionary

  1. select agents
  2. select committee
  3. select committees
  4. select meeting
  5. select meetings
  6. select out
  7. select vestries
  8. select vestry
  9. selectabilities
  10. selectability
  11. selectable

Source and license

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