Word.ws English Dictionary

whittling down to size

whittling down to size is the present participle and gerund of whittle down to size.

Meaning of whittle 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

Questions about whittling down to size

What is whittling down to size the present participle and gerund of?
Whittling down to size is the present participle and gerund of whittle down to size.

Words near whittling down to size in the dictionary

  1. Whittleseys
  2. Whittlesford
  3. Whittlestone
  4. whittling
  5. whittling down
  6. whittling down to size
  7. whittling the whalebone
  8. whittlings
  9. Whittock
  10. Whittocks
  11. Whittome

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whittling down to size (page history and authors); 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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Cite this entry: “whittling down to size.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whittling_down_to_size. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.