Word.ws English Dictionary

sweep aside

sweep aside verb: to push or brush to the side.

Verb

sweep aside (third-person singular simple present sweeps aside, present participle sweeping aside, simple past and past participle swept aside)

  1. To push or brush to the side.
    • On this section, the high five-span masonry viaduct over the Whiteadder Water, at Chirnside, withstood the flood, but four of the six spans of the bridge carrying the siding to the nearby paper mill were demolished, and the track, with the sleepers still in position, was swept aside, on to the...1949 January and February, “Notes and News: Damage to Branch Lines”, in Railway Magazine, pages 64–65
  2. (idiomatic) To overcome an obstacle with little effort.
    • Wolves swept aside Championship outfit Doncaster at Molineux to earn a place in the fourth round of the FA Cup.2011 January 18, “Wolverhampton 5 - 0 Doncaster”, in BBC
  3. (idiomatic) To ignore, brush off.

Forms of sweep aside

third-person singular presentsweeps aside
present participlesweeping aside
past participleswept aside
pastswept aside

Questions about sweep aside

What does sweep aside mean?
Sweep aside means to push or brush to the side.
What part of speech is sweep aside?
Sweep aside is a verb.
What is the past tense of sweep aside?
The past tense of sweep aside is swept aside.

Words near sweep aside in the dictionary

  1. Sweens
  2. sweeny
  3. Sweenys
  4. sweep
  5. sweep along
  6. sweep aside
  7. sweep away
  8. sweep in
  9. sweep line
  10. sweep lines
  11. sweep net

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sweep aside (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-sweep aside.ogg.

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