Word.ws English Dictionary

whittle down to size

whittle down to size verb: synonym of cut down to size.

Verb

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

  1. Synonym of cut down to size.
    • If he starts playing the big, tough hombre on the southside, those boys are just liable to whittle him down to size."1999, Matt Braun, El Paso, page 14
    • She seldom suffered fools. With one withering glance, she could whittle my father, who was a big man, down to size.2012, Sonny Collins, Anasazi Dreams: In Search of Coyote People, page 75

Synonyms of whittle down to size

Forms of whittle down to size

third-person singular presentwhittles down to size
present participlewhittling down to size
past participlewhittled down to size
pastwhittled down to size

Questions about whittle down to size

What does whittle down to size mean?
Whittle down to size means synonym of cut down to size.
What part of speech is whittle down to size?
Whittle down to size is a verb.
What is the past tense of whittle down to size?
The past tense of whittle down to size is whittled down to size.

Words near whittle down to size in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whittle down to size (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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