Word.ws English Dictionary

whittle away

whittle away verb: to drain away; to wear down or be slowly worn down.

Verb

whittle away (third-person singular simple present whittles away, present participle whittling away, simple past and past participle whittled away)

  1. (intransitive, transitive) To drain away; to wear down or be slowly worn down.
    • what little remained of his self-confidence was slowly whittling away
    • she sat in the living-room and cried most of the time, while Boo slowly whittled away all the furniture in the house1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC

Forms of whittle away

third-person singular presentwhittles away
present participlewhittling away
past participlewhittled away
pastwhittled away

Questions about whittle away

What does whittle away mean?
Whittle away means to drain away; to wear down or be slowly worn down.
What part of speech is whittle away?
Whittle away is a verb.
What is the past tense of whittle away?
The past tense of whittle away is whittled away.

Words near whittle away in the dictionary

  1. Whittinghams
  2. Whittington
  3. Whittingtonian
  4. Whittingtons
  5. whittle
  6. whittle away
  7. whittle down
  8. whittle down to size
  9. Whittle likelihood
  10. Whittle likelihoods
  11. whittle the whalebone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whittle away (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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