Word.ws English Dictionary

sit on the fence

sit on the fence verb: to remain neutral on a certain topic, to not have a stance or opinion.

sit on the fence: to remain neutral on a certain topic, to not have a stance or opinion
Image: Joseph Morewood Staniforth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

sit on the fence (third-person singular simple present sits on the fence, present participle sitting on the fence, simple past and past participle sat on the fence)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To remain neutral on a certain topic, to not have a stance or opinion.
    • and Bloomah will sometimes sit on the fence, concerning whose discretion, the same thing may be said...1897, John James Procter, The philosopher in the clearing, page 240
    • The curate refused to label himself; so the squire growled, "Oh, you sit on the fence, do you?"1956, Theology, Great Britain: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, page 22

Examples of sit on the fence in a sentence

  • Elijah stepped forward and said to the people, "How long will you sit on the fence?1972, Joseph Robinson, The first book of Kings, page 207:
  • We won’t win if we sit on the fence about the most crucial issue that has faced our country for a generation.2019 April 20, Tom Watson, “Labour can’t defeat Nigel Farage by sitting on the fence”, in The Observer, →ISSN:

Forms of sit on the fence

third-person singular presentsits on the fence
present participlesitting on the fence
past participlesat on the fence
pastsat on the fence

Questions about sit on the fence

What does sit on the fence mean?
Sit on the fence means to remain neutral on a certain topic, to not have a stance or opinion.
How do you use sit on the fence in a sentence?
Elijah stepped forward and said to the people, "How long will you sit on the fence?
What part of speech is sit on the fence?
Sit on the fence is a verb.
What is the past tense of sit on the fence?
The past tense of sit on the fence is sat on the fence.

Words near sit on the fence in the dictionary

  1. sit on one's arse
  2. sit on one's ass
  3. sit on one's hands
  4. sit on one's laurels
  5. sit on someone's wheel
  6. sit on the fence
  7. sit one's ass down
  8. sit one's butt down
  9. sit out
  10. sit outs
  11. sit over

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sit on the fence (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-sit on the fence.ogg.

Cite this entry: “sit on the fence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sit_on_the_fence. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.