Word.ws English Dictionary

stopping dead

stopping dead is the present participle and gerund of stop dead.

Meaning of stop dead

Verb

stop dead (third-person singular simple present stops dead, present participle stopping dead, simple past and past participle stopped dead)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To stop suddenly.
    • At the height of the crisis, according to a retired SAC wing commander, SAC airborne alert bombers deliberately flew past their turnaround points toward Soviet airspace, an unambiguous threat which Soviet radar operators would certainly have recognized and reported. "I knew what my target was," the...1995, Richard Rhodes, “Scorpions in a Bottle”, in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, New York: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 575

Questions about stopping dead

What is stopping dead the present participle and gerund of?
Stopping dead is the present participle and gerund of stop dead.

Words near stopping dead in the dictionary

  1. stopping and smelling the flowers
  2. stopping and smelling the roses
  3. stopping at nothing
  4. stopping by
  5. stopping cold
  6. stopping dead
  7. stopping distance
  8. stopping distances
  9. stopping down
  10. stopping in
  11. stopping into

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stopping dead (page history and authors); stop dead (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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