Word.ws English Dictionary

walk a tightrope

walk a tightrope verb: to undertake a precarious course of action.

Verb

walk a tightrope (third-person singular simple present walks a tightrope, present participle walking a tightrope, simple past and past participle walked a tightrope)

  1. (figuratively) To undertake a precarious course of action.
    • The company constantly walked a tightrope between operating on little money and filling orders quickly.
    • The older me, the one who prefers wine to fizz, wishes Leerhsen had more to say about things like: a) the elite and vernacular food worlds pre- and post-Bourdain; b) how Bourdain walked a moral tightrope across the conventions of travel writing and reporting, no mean feat for a wealthy white man in...2022 October 3, Dwitght Garner, “Anthony Bourdain’s New Biography: Light on Subtlety, Heavy on Grit”, in The New York Times

Forms of walk a tightrope

third-person singular presentwalks a tightrope
present participlewalking a tightrope
past participlewalked a tightrope
pastwalked a tightrope

Questions about walk a tightrope

What does walk a tightrope mean?
Walk a tightrope means to undertake a precarious course of action.
What part of speech is walk a tightrope?
Walk a tightrope is a verb.
What is the past tense of walk a tightrope?
The past tense of walk a tightrope is walked a tightrope.

Words near walk a tightrope in the dictionary

  1. waliships
  2. Waliszew
  3. walk
  4. walk a mile in someone's shoes
  5. walk a straight line
  6. walk a tightrope
  7. walk about
  8. walk after lunch
  9. walk all over
  10. walk alone
  11. walk and chew gum at the same time

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: walk a tightrope (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: “walk a tightrope.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/walk_a_tightrope. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.