Word.ws English Dictionary

smooth over

smooth over verb: to make (a rough surface) smooth.

Verb

smooth over (third-person singular simple present smooths over, present participle smoothing over, simple past and past participle smoothed over)

  1. (transitive) To make (a rough surface) smooth
  2. (transitive) To pacify (e.g. rumours)
    • Then, as usual, the sheep broke into "Four legs good, two legs bad!" and the momentary awkwardness was smoothed over.1943 November – 1944 February (date written; published 1945 August 17), George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Animal Farm […], London: Secker & Warburg, published May 1962, →OCLC
    • A revolution would allow people to be who they really are: controlling their own appearance, work sexuality; their own lives. A revolution means consciously confronting the bigotry that divides us—not smoothing it over and hoping it will go away.1982 August 14, Ian Daniels, “Nazis In Chicago”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 5, page 5

Forms of smooth over

third-person singular presentsmooths over
present participlesmoothing over
past participlesmoothed over
pastsmoothed over

Questions about smooth over

What does smooth over mean?
Smooth over means to make (a rough surface) smooth.
What part of speech is smooth over?
Smooth over is a verb.
What is the past tense of smooth over?
The past tense of smooth over is smoothed over.

Words near smooth over in the dictionary

  1. smooth newt
  2. smooth newts
  3. smooth operator
  4. smooth operators
  5. smooth out
  6. smooth over
  7. smooth sailing
  8. smooth shark
  9. smooth sharked
  10. smooth sharking
  11. smooth sharks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: smooth over (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: “smooth over.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/smooth_over. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.