Word.ws English Dictionary

steamroll

/ˈstiːmˌɹoʊl/

steamroll verb: to flatten, as if with a steamroller.

Verb

steamroll (third-person singular simple present steamrolls, present participle steamrolling, simple past and past participle steamrolled)

  1. To flatten, as if with a steamroller.
    • The service had one small break when it was suspended between October, 1904, and April, 1905, owing to the refusal of the Helston Rural District Council to steam roll the road. At this time there was no steam roller in use anywhere west of Plymouth, and the railway company loaned one of its steam...1952 September, A. E. C. Dent, “Early G.W.R. Road Services”, in Railway Magazine, page 631
  2. (figuratively) To ruthlessly crush or overwhelm.
    • I tried to participate in a sports tournament, but got steamrolled by the better players there.
    • In The Trial of Henry Kissinger the late British journalist, best known for his Vanity Fair columns, his deliberately provocative opinion that women aren’t funny and his penchant for booze and fags, steamrolls the former US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for Presidents Nixon and...2019, John O’Connell, chapter 8, in Bowie's Bookshelf, →ISBN

Forms of steamroll

third-person singular presentsteamrolls
present participlesteamrolling
past participlesteamrolled
paststeamrolled

Origin of steamroll

From steam + roll.

Questions about steamroll

What does steamroll mean?
Steamroll means to flatten, as if with a steamroller.
What part of speech is steamroll?
Steamroll is a verb.
How do you pronounce steamroll?
Steamroll is pronounced /ˈstiːmˌɹoʊl/.
What is the past tense of steamroll?
The past tense of steamroll is steamrolled.

Words near steamroll in the dictionary

  1. steampunkers
  2. steampunking
  3. steampunkish
  4. steampunks
  5. steampunky
  6. steamroll
  7. steamrolled
  8. steamroller
  9. steamrollered
  10. steamrollering
  11. steamrollers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: steamroll (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-steamroll.wav.

Cite this entry: “steamroll.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/steamroll. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.