Word.ws English Dictionary

shoots from the hip

shoots from the hip is the third-person singular simple present indicative of shoot from the hip.

Meaning of shoot from the hip

Verb

shoot from the hip (third-person singular simple present shoots from the hip, present participle shooting from the hip, simple past and past participle shot from the hip)

  1. (literally) To discharge a firearm while it is held near the hip, without taking time to aim via the gunsights.
    • “As to their rifle fire, it was useless.” “They shoot from the hip, and don’t seem to aim at anything in particular.”1914, Arthur Conan Doyle, “The German War”, in The Contemptible Little Army
  2. (figuratively) To speak or act quickly based on first impressions, without carefully studying the background information, wider context, etc.
    • Trump is shooting from the hip, spraying insults 360 degrees, telling lies, stoking fears and making threats that many in our military and the F.B.I. would refuse to implement.2016 June 15, Thomas L. Friedman, “Opinion: Lessons of Hiroshima and Orlando”, in New York Times, retrieved 10 May 2018

Questions about shoots from the hip

What is shoots from the hip the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Shoots from the hip is the third-person singular simple present indicative of shoot from the hip.

Words near shoots from the hip in the dictionary

  1. shoots back
  2. shoots daggers
  3. shoots down
  4. shoots first and asks questions later
  5. shoots for the moon
  6. shoots from the hip
  7. shoots from the lip
  8. shoots holes
  9. shoots off
  10. shoots off at the mouth
  11. shoots off one's mouth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoots from the hip (page history and authors); shoot from the hip (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: “shoots from the hip.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shoots_from_the_hip. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.