wimp out

English

Etymology

From wimp (“one who is weak and unconfident”).

Verb

wimp out (third-person singular simple present wimps out, present participle wimping out, simple past and past participle wimped out)

  1. (intransitive, informal, derogatory) To back out of something because of cowardice.
    • 2006 January 29, Tom Armstrong, Marvin (comic):
      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.
    • 2009 February 4, Thomas L. Friedman, “Don’t Try This at Home”, in The New York Times‎[1], archived from the original on 26 January 2021:
      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 the face of earth — casualties be damned.
    • 2009 March 1, Dave Itzkoff, “Offering Terror of an Everyday Variety”, in The New York Times‎[2], archived from the original on 7 July 2020:
      I could have taken a big chunk out of the show that day by wimping out.

Synonyms

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.