Word.ws English Dictionary

start out

start out verb: to emerge suddenly; to jump out.

Verb

start out (third-person singular simple present starts out, present participle starting out, simple past and past participle started out)

  1. To emerge suddenly; to jump out.
  2. To be or become conspicuous; to stand out.
    • I do not find that any particulars of this day's conversation start out. But it was in general most agreeable.1790, James Boswell, in Danziger & Brady (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer (Journals 1789–1795), Yale 1989, p. 102
  3. To begin.
    • He started out writing for the school magazine, and now he's a TV talk show celebrity.
    • It would also form part of a new carriage design, which had started out on Swindon drawing office easels two years earlier.2024 March 20, Greg Morse, “XP64: the train the ^([sic]): [that] launched a new style”, in RAIL, number 1005, page 45

Forms of start out

third-person singular presentstarts out
present participlestarting out
past participlestarted out
paststarted out

Questions about start out

What does start out mean?
Start out means to emerge suddenly; to jump out.
What part of speech is start out?
Start out is a verb.
What is the past tense of start out?
The past tense of start out is started out.

Words near start out in the dictionary

  1. start off
  2. start off on the right foot
  3. start off on the wrong foot
  4. start on
  5. start on at
  6. start out
  7. start over
  8. start page
  9. start pages
  10. Start Point
  11. start the ball rolling

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: start out (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: “start out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/start_out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.