Word.ws English Dictionary

taking leave

taking leave is the present participle and gerund of take leave.

Meaning of take leave

Verb

take leave (third-person singular simple present takes leave, present participle taking leave, simple past took leave, past participle taken leave)

  1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see take, leave.
    • Romney had already taken leave from Bain Capital by the time the American Pad & Paper layoffs took place.2011 March, W James Antle III, “Front-runner Failure”, in American Spectator, volume 44, number 2, page 12
  2. (often, with-of) To depart.
    • So after learning a great deal about iron founding and much more about pike fishing, one regretfully took leave of a shop full of kindly characters and proceeded to a worse lot of odours in the brass foundry.1944 November and December, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—II”, in Railway Magazine, page 343

Questions about taking leave

What is taking leave the present participle and gerund of?
Taking leave is the present participle and gerund of take leave.

Words near taking leave in the dictionary

  1. taking its rise
  2. taking its toll
  3. taking kindly
  4. taking L's
  5. taking law into one's own hands
  6. taking leave
  7. taking leave of one's senses
  8. taking liberties
  9. taking lightly
  10. taking long
  11. taking lying down

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: taking leave (page history and authors); take leave (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “taking leave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/taking_leave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.