Word.ws English Dictionary

stand pat

stand pat verb: to play one's hand without drawing any more cards.

Verb

stand pat (third-person singular simple present stands pat, present participle standing pat, simple past and past participle stood pat)

  1. (intransitive) To play one's hand without drawing any more cards.
    • With a mixed hand and the highest card the curse of Scotland, I've seen that man stand pat in a game with four millionaire mining men.1920, Peter B. Kyne, chapter IV, in The Understanding Heart
  2. (intransitive) To stop hitting; to declare one's hand as final.
    • After getting a hand of 20, the player stood pat.
    Synonyms:
    stand, stick
  3. (idiomatic) To resist changes.
    • China has cut rates and allowed banks to boost lending, while some countries, such as South Korea have stood pat, fearful that inflation pressures could reignite.2012, "Asia's Local Growth Dilemma", Wall Street Journal, by Alex Frangos, 21st of July

Synonyms of stand pat

Forms of stand pat

third-person singular presentstands pat
present participlestanding pat
past participlestood pat
paststood pat

Origin of stand pat

Probably originally a poker phrase, with "pat" equaling "optimal", meaning that drawing more cards is unnecessary. Later the phrase came to be employed in other spheres. "Stand pat" was actively used in U.S. political campaigns of the 1900s, quickly gaining a sense of "being reactionary, resistant to dramatic changes in policy". Moreover, a noun, standpatter, was coined to denote such politicians.

Words formed from stand pat

Questions about stand pat

What does stand pat mean?
Stand pat means to play one's hand without drawing any more cards.
What part of speech is stand pat?
Stand pat is a verb.
What is the past tense of stand pat?
The past tense of stand pat is stood pat.

Words near stand pat in the dictionary

  1. stand out a mile
  2. stand out like a sore thumb
  3. stand out like dog's balls
  4. stand over
  5. stand pad
  6. stand pat
  7. stand pie
  8. stand pies
  9. stand Sam
  10. stand sentinel
  11. stand sentry

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stand pat (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-stand pat.ogg.

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