Word.ws English Dictionary

tumble on

tumble on verb: to accidentally encounter (a person or situation).

Verb

tumble on (third-person singular simple present tumbles on, present participle tumbling on, simple past and past participle tumbled on)

  1. (idiomatic, transitive) To accidentally encounter (a person or situation).
    • “I’m luck to have fallen upon you, Kemp. You must help me. Fancy tumbling on you just now! I’m in a devilish scrape […]”1897, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “chapter 17”, in The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance, New York, N.Y.; London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, →OCLC, page 148
    • “He murdered the man all right. I tumbled on the truth by the merest accident, when I’d pretty nearly chucked the whole job.”1910, Edith Wharton, “The Bolted Door”, in Tales of Men and Ghosts, New York: Scribner, page 69

Synonyms of tumble on

Forms of tumble on

third-person singular presenttumbles on
present participletumbling on
past participletumbled on
pasttumbled on

Questions about tumble on

What does tumble on mean?
Tumble on means to accidentally encounter (a person or situation).
What part of speech is tumble on?
Tumble on is a verb.
What is the past tense of tumble on?
The past tense of tumble on is tumbled on.

Words near tumble on in the dictionary

  1. tumble home
  2. tumble in
  3. tumble motor
  4. tumble motors
  5. tumble mustard
  6. tumble on
  7. tumble ringwing
  8. tumble ringwings
  9. tumble thistle
  10. tumble to
  11. tumble together

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tumble on (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-tumble on.ogg.

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