Word.ws English Dictionary

stay out

stay out verb: to spend time out of one's house.

Verb

stay out (third-person singular simple present stays out, present participle staying out, simple past and past participle stayed out)

  1. (intransitive) To spend time out of one's house.
    • He stayed out all night in the bar.
    • She found a boyfriend. Not an Italian. She went to the movies with him. She stayed out late. I didn't protest.1972 March 14, Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather, spoken by Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), Paramount Pictures
  2. (transitive) To avoid going into somewhere.
    • He stayed out of the bar all night.
  3. (obsolete) To outstay; to stay longer than.
    • The company had now staid so long, that Mrs Fitzpatrick plainly perceived they all designed to stay out each other. She therefore resolved to rid herself of Jones, he being the visitant to whom she thought the least ceremony was due.1749, Henry Fielding, “Which Consists of Visiting”, in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, volume V, London: A[ndrew] Millar, […], →OCLC, book XIII, page 29

Forms of stay out

third-person singular presentstays out
present participlestaying out
past participlestayed out
paststayed out

Words formed from stay out

Questions about stay out

What does stay out mean?
Stay out means to spend time out of one's house.
What part of speech is stay out?
Stay out is a verb.
What is the past tense of stay out?
The past tense of stay out is stayed out.

Words near stay out in the dictionary

  1. stay hungry
  2. stay in
  3. stay in one's lane
  4. stay loose
  5. stay on
  6. stay out
  7. stay over
  8. stay put
  9. stay tackle
  10. stay tackles
  11. stay the course

Source and license

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