Word.ws English Dictionary

suss out

suss out verb: to come to understand (a person).

Verb

suss out (third-person singular simple present susses out, present participle sussing out, simple past and past participle sussed out)

  1. (colloquial, transitive) To come to understand (a person).
    • We've sussed him out—he only drinks on Fridays and only in that bar in town.
    • In essence, security experts most familiar with this breach believe that a nation-state — likely China or Russia — stole the data in order to suss out current spies and pick out potential targets they could recruit as spies.2019 March 19, Mike McKee, “The Case of the Missing Data”, in Dark Reading, archived from the original on 20 Aug 2022
  2. (colloquial, transitive) To manage to work (something) out, to discover or determine (something).
    • We've sussed out how to open the lock.
    • You sussed it out, didn't you?1997, “Hunter”, in Homogenic, performed by Björk

Forms of suss out

third-person singular presentsusses out
present participlesussing out
past participlesussed out
pastsussed out

Origin of suss out

Clipping of suspect + out. Compare sus.

Questions about suss out

What does suss out mean?
Suss out means to come to understand (a person).
What part of speech is suss out?
Suss out is a verb.
What is the past tense of suss out?
The past tense of suss out is sussed out.

Words near suss out in the dictionary

  1. Susquehannock
  2. Susquehannocks
  3. suss
  4. suss law
  5. suss laws
  6. suss out
  7. sussarara
  8. Sussberg
  9. sussed
  10. sussed out
  11. susser

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: suss 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-suss out.ogg.

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