Word.ws English Dictionary

wear thin

wear thin verb: to lessen or weaken over time, as from overuse.

Verb

wear thin (third-person singular simple present wears thin, present participle wearing thin, simple past wore thin, past participle worn thin)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To lessen or weaken over time, as from overuse.
    • Your jocose wisecracks have already worn thin.
    • Women and gay people, for example, can start to live more freely with the breakdown of patriarchal and heterosexist institutions, while workers and people of color are able to challenge the economics of poverty and the ideology of racism as the rationales behind those notions continue to wear ever...1982 February 6, Lester Strong, “A World Cast Adrift”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 28, page 14

Forms of wear thin

third-person singular presentwears thin
present participlewearing thin
pastwore thin
past participleworn thin

Questions about wear thin

What does wear thin mean?
Wear thin means to lessen or weaken over time, as from overuse.
What part of speech is wear thin?
Wear thin is a verb.
What is the past tense of wear thin?
The past tense of wear thin is wore thin.

Words near wear thin in the dictionary

  1. wear rose-colored glasses
  2. wear sackcloth and ashes
  3. wear the breeches
  4. wear the pants
  5. wear the trousers
  6. wear thin
  7. wear through
  8. wear too many hats
  9. wear two hats
  10. wear up
  11. wear weary

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wear thin (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-wear thin.ogg.

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