wimp out
wimp out verb: to back out of something because of cowardice.
Verb
wimp out (third-person singular simple present wimps out, present participle wimping out, simple past and past participle wimped out)
- To back out of something because of cowardice.
- Your son has been a holy terror! He kept getting into trouble and refusing to mind me! After repeatedly trying to get him to behave, I finally gave up. I wimped out. I have the womb to be a parent, but not the backbone.2006 January 29, Tom Armstrong, Marvin (comic)
- Meanwhile, the West Bank Palestinian leaders are busy publicly collecting food and blankets to help all those Palestinian civilians brutalized by the Israeli incursion into Gaza, while privately demanding to know from senior Israeli officials why they wimped out and didn’t wipe Hamas in Gaza off...2009 February 4, Thomas L. Friedman, “Don’t Try This at Home”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Jan 2021
- Synonyms:
- chicken out
Synonyms of wimp out
Forms of wimp out
| third-person singular present | wimps out |
|---|---|
| present participle | wimping out |
| past participle | wimped out |
| past | wimped out |
Origin of wimp out
From wimp (“one who is weak and unconfident”).
Questions about wimp out
- What does wimp out mean?
- Wimp out means to back out of something because of cowardice.
- What part of speech is wimp out?
- Wimp out is a verb.
- What is the past tense of wimp out?
- The past tense of wimp out is wimped out.
Words near wimp out in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wimp out (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “wimp out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wimp_out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.