Word.ws English Dictionary

undertow

undertow verb: to pull or tow under; drag beneath; pull down.

Verb

undertow (third-person singular simple present undertows, present participle undertowing, simple past and past participle undertowed)

  1. (transitive) To pull or tow under; drag beneath; pull down.
    • Off in a gallop the General wheeled vanishing, And sped his steed away into the blue, When Lineoln now alone let go his speech Which had before been undertowed by force, [...]1914, Denton Jaques Snider, Lincoln at Richmond
  2. (transitive) To pull down by, or as by, an undertow.
    • A sense that the air, a sighting of muddy river, or that outcrop of rock so implacably bland in the light of midday, is undertowed by memory.1998, Richard Gough, David Williams, Ric Allsopp, Performance Research: On Place
    • I sink because I cannot swim, undertowed to the Centre, abandoning all remembrance of the surface toward the cloud of unknowing, without choice I'm pulled.2003, Michael T. Leibig, Mike Leibig Traveling in Disguise
  3. (intransitive) To flow or behave as an undertow.
    • Everybody knows this and acts accordingly; but when you say it, it sounds bad and bold, and makes you uncomfortable to hear it, because the puritan blood is still undertowing in your veins.1917, The Unpopular review

Noun

undertow (plural undertows)

  1. A short-range flow of water returning seaward from the waves breaking on the shore.
    • A strong undertow may sweep a returning swimmer off their feet but it does not carry them far from the shore.
  2. (broadly) A feeling that runs contrary to one's normal one.

undertow meaning in Tamil and Urdu

undertow in Tamil

நீர்அலை இழுப்பு

undertow in Urdu

لوٹتی لہر, لوٹتی موج

Forms of undertow

Verb
third-person singular presentundertows
present participleundertowing
past participleundertowed
pastundertowed
Noun
pluralundertows

Origin of undertow

From under- + tow.

Questions about undertow

What does undertow mean?
Undertow means to pull or tow under; drag beneath; pull down.
What is undertow in Tamil?
Undertow in Tamil is நீர்அலை இழுப்பு. See Undertow meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is undertow?
Undertow can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of undertow?
The past tense of undertow is undertowed.

Words near undertow in the dictionary

  1. undertoning
  2. undertook
  3. undertooled
  4. undertourism
  5. undertouristed
  6. undertow
  7. undertowed
  8. undertowing
  9. undertows
  10. undertrack
  11. undertracks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: undertow (page history and authors); undertow (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); undertow (Urdu Wiktionary) (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-undertow.wav.

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