adjective, verb
adjective (dumber, dumbest)
1 (old-fashioned, sometimes offensive) unable to speak:
She was born deaf and dumb.
HELPNOTE Dumb used in this meaning is old-fashioned and can be offensive. It is better to use speech-impaired instead.
2 temporarily not speaking or refusing to speak:
We were all struck dumb with amazement. * We all sat there in dumb silence.
3 (informal, especially AmE) stupid:
That was a pretty dumb thing to do. * If the police question you, act dumb (= pretend you do not know anything). * In all her early movies she always played a dumb blonde.
dumbly adverb:
'Are you all right?' Laura nodded dumbly.
dumbness noun [U]
Part of speech: verb
PHRASALVERBS
dumb down
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for dumb is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is dumb a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, dumb is tagged as verb.
Does dumb appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — dumb appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
