waste no time
waste no time verb: to begin or to finish something immediately.
Verb
waste no time (third-person singular simple present wastes no time, present participle wasting no time, simple past and past participle wasted no time)
- To begin or to finish something immediately.
- But George’s eye had fallen upon Bundle, as she sat half in and half out of the window, and he remembered discretion just in time. He rose.
“We must waste no time. I must send off some wires at once.”1925, Agatha Christie, The Secret of Chimneys - His exhortations to his assistants to waste no time in getting on with the job, and to be tactful and courteous with those outside the railway service with whom they had to deal, are as apposite today as they were a century ago.1958 August, “More Light on Brunel”, in Railway Magazine, page 516
- But George’s eye had fallen upon Bundle, as she sat half in and half out of the window, and he remembered discretion just in time. He rose.
Forms of waste no time
| third-person singular present | wastes no time |
|---|---|
| present participle | wasting no time |
| past participle | wasted no time |
| past | wasted no time |
Words formed from waste no time
- there's no time to waste
- time-waster
- time-wasting
- waste of time
- waste time
Questions about waste no time
- What does waste no time mean?
- Waste no time means to begin or to finish something immediately.
- What part of speech is waste no time?
- Waste no time is a verb.
- What is the past tense of waste no time?
- The past tense of waste no time is wasted no time.
Words near waste no time in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: waste no time (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: “waste no time.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/waste_no_time. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.