Word.ws English Dictionary

tilt at windmills

tilt at windmills verb: to attack imaginary enemies.

tilt at windmills: to attack imaginary enemies
Image: G. A. Harker, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

tilt at windmills (third-person singular simple present tilts at windmills, present participle tilting at windmills, simple past and past participle tilted at windmills)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To attack imaginary enemies.
    Synonyms:
    charge at windmills, fight windmills
  2. (broadly, idiomatic, intransitive) To go on a wild-goose chase; to persistently engage in a futile activity.
    Synonyms:
    chase a rainbow

Synonyms of tilt at windmills

Forms of tilt at windmills

third-person singular presenttilts at windmills
present participletilting at windmills
past participletilted at windmills
pasttilted at windmills

Origin of tilt at windmills

From a passage in the novel Don Quixote where the eponymous character tilts (i.e. jousts) at windmills that he has mistaken for giants.

Questions about tilt at windmills

What does tilt at windmills mean?
Tilt at windmills means to attack imaginary enemies.
What part of speech is tilt at windmills?
Tilt at windmills is a verb.
What is the past tense of tilt at windmills?
The past tense of tilt at windmills is tilted at windmills.

Words near tilt at windmills in the dictionary

  1. Tilson
  2. Tilsons
  3. Tilstone Fearnall
  4. tilsuprost
  5. tilt
  6. tilt at windmills
  7. tilt barrier
  8. tilt barriers
  9. Tilt Cove
  10. tilt fan
  11. tilt fans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tilt at windmills (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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Cite this entry: “tilt at windmills.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tilt_at_windmills. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.