Word.ws English Dictionary

stick one's neck out

stick one's neck out verb: to take a risk, putting oneself in a vulnerable position.

Verb

stick one's neck out (third-person singular simple present sticks one's neck out, present participle sticking one's neck out, simple past and past participle stuck one's neck out)

  1. (idiomatic) To take a risk, putting oneself in a vulnerable position.
    • Uncle Tom's study was a place I seldom entered during my visits to Brinkley Court, because when I did go there he always grabbed me and started to talk about old silver, whereas if he caught me in the open he often touched on other topics, and the way I looked at it was that there was no sense in...1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter XVI, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC
    • Bogey is the cynical cafe owner who lives by his own moral code and sticks his neck out for “no one.”2014, David Bleiler, TLA Video & DVD Guide 2004: The Discerning Film Lover's Guide, St. Martin's Griffin, →ISBN

Forms of stick one's neck out

third-person singular presentsticks one's neck out
present participlesticking one's neck out
past participlestuck one's neck out
paststuck one's neck out

Questions about stick one's neck out

What does stick one's neck out mean?
Stick one's neck out means to take a risk, putting oneself in a vulnerable position.
What part of speech is stick one's neck out?
Stick one's neck out is a verb.
What is the past tense of stick one's neck out?
The past tense of stick one's neck out is stuck one's neck out.

Words near stick one's neck out in the dictionary

  1. stick one on
  2. stick one's dick in crazy
  3. stick one's foot in it
  4. stick one's foot in one's mouth
  5. stick one's head in the sand
  6. stick one's neck out
  7. stick one's nose in
  8. stick one's nose into
  9. stick one's oar in
  10. stick one's tongue out
  11. stick out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stick one's neck 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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