Word.ws English Dictionary

standing down

standing down is the present participle and gerund of stand down.

Meaning of stand down

Verb

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

  1. (idiomatic) To wait; to stop pursuing, stop fighting, or relax from a heightened readiness posture.
    • They ordered the troops to stand down for the moment.
  2. (ambitransitive) To withdraw or retire from a position or from a team.
    • The criminal case was launched after the aviation giant’s subsidiary stood down a trained health and safety representative hours after he directed others to cease work.2023 November 16, “Qantas illegally stood down worker who stopped cleaning of planes at start of Covid pandemic”, in The Guardian, sourced from Australian Assocated Press, →ISSN

Questions about standing down

What is standing down the present participle and gerund of?
Standing down is the present participle and gerund of stand down.

Words near standing down in the dictionary

  1. standing crops
  2. standing cup
  3. standing cups
  4. standing desk
  5. standing desks
  6. standing down
  7. standing eight
  8. standing eights
  9. standing end
  10. standing ends
  11. standing fast

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: standing down (page history and authors); stand down (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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Cite this entry: “standing down.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/standing_down. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.