Word.ws English Dictionary

whistle down the wind

whistle down the wind verb: to set (someone) free, allowing them to go their own way and do what they choose.

Verb

whistle down the wind (third-person singular simple present whistles down the wind, present participle whistling down the wind, simple past and past participle whistled down the wind)

  1. (transitive) To set (someone) free, allowing them to go their own way and do what they choose.
    • Can he do nothing for his Burns but make a Gauger of him; lionise him, bedinner him, for a foolish while: then whistle him down the wind, to desperation and bitter death?1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “chapter VI, The Landed”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, book IV (Horoscope)
  2. (transitive) To badmouth someone or something; to disparage.
    • It is very easy for you to whistle down the wind an eligible partner. There are far too many of us who can only wish we might have had the choice!2013, April Kihlstrom, An Outrageous Proposal
  3. To talk to no purpose.

Forms of whistle down the wind

third-person singular presentwhistles down the wind
present participlewhistling down the wind
past participlewhistled down the wind
pastwhistled down the wind

Questions about whistle down the wind

What does whistle down the wind mean?
Whistle down the wind means to set (someone) free, allowing them to go their own way and do what they choose.
What part of speech is whistle down the wind?
Whistle down the wind is a verb.
What is the past tense of whistle down the wind?
The past tense of whistle down the wind is whistled down the wind.

Words near whistle down the wind in the dictionary

  1. whistle blower
  2. whistle blowers
  3. whistle board
  4. whistle boards
  5. whistle Dixie
  6. whistle down the wind
  7. whistle for
  8. whistle graph
  9. whistle in the dark
  10. whistle in the wind
  11. whistle jigs to a milestone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whistle down the wind (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-whistle down the wind.wav.

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