Word.ws English Dictionary

stick the knife in

stick the knife in verb: to say or do something deliberately and unnecessarily malicious.

Verb

stick the knife in (third-person singular simple present sticks the knife in, present participle sticking the knife in, simple past and past participle stuck the knife in)

  1. (idiomatic) To say or do something deliberately and unnecessarily malicious.
    • Bengali speaks with courtly floweriness even when sticking the knife in, and Thompson's well-meaning British bluntness was not appreciated.2001, Ezra Greenspan, Jonathan Rose, Book History, volume 4, page 307

Forms of stick the knife in

third-person singular presentsticks the knife in
present participlesticking the knife in
past participlestuck the knife in
paststuck the knife in

Questions about stick the knife in

What does stick the knife in mean?
Stick the knife in means to say or do something deliberately and unnecessarily malicious.
What part of speech is stick the knife in?
Stick the knife in is a verb.
What is the past tense of stick the knife in?
The past tense of stick the knife in is stuck the knife in.

Words near stick the knife in in the dictionary

  1. stick shaker
  2. stick shakers
  3. stick shift
  4. stick shifts
  5. stick that in your pipe and smoke it
  6. stick the knife in
  7. stick the landing
  8. stick time
  9. stick times
  10. stick to
  11. stick to business

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stick the knife in (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: En-au-stick the knife in.ogg.

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