Word.ws English Dictionary

spiking someone's guns

spiking someone's guns is the present participle and gerund of spike someone's guns.

Meaning of spike someone's guns

Verb

spike someone's guns (third-person singular simple present spikes someone's guns, present participle spiking someone's guns, simple past and past participle spiked someone's guns)

  1. To frustrate a person's efforts or designs; to undercut, to render helpless.
    • But whatever the Russians may have felt (and, apparently, still do feel) about Shakespear, his superiors were delighted by the way he had so skilfully spiked the Tsar's guns by liberating his subjects.1990, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, Folio Society, published 2010, page 205

Questions about spiking someone's guns

What is spiking someone's guns the present participle and gerund of?
Spiking someone's guns is the present participle and gerund of spike someone's guns.

Words near spiking someone's guns in the dictionary

  1. spiking
  2. spiking a temp
  3. spiking a temperature
  4. spiking neural network
  5. spiking neural networks
  6. spiking someone's guns
  7. spiking up
  8. spikings
  9. Spikkestad
  10. spiknel
  11. spiks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spiking someone's guns (page history and authors); spike someone's guns (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: “spiking someone's guns.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/spiking_someone%27s_guns. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.