Comb-out

//ˈkəʊ̯mˌaʊ̯t// noun, slang

noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An act of combing out hair. countable, uncountable
  2. 2
    the act of carefully weeding out unwanted things or people wordnet
  3. 3
    The identification and removal of someone or something. countable, idiomatic, informal, uncountable
  4. 4
    the act of removing tangles from you hair with a comb wordnet
  5. 5
    The act of sorting out. countable, idiomatic, slang, uncountable

    "McCann and I took ten men each and made a systematic comb-out of the Gardens. Every sniper we found we shot out of hand."

Synonyms

All synonyms
teasing

Example

More examples

"McCann and I took ten men each and made a systematic comb-out of the Gardens. Every sniper we found we shot out of hand."

Etymology

Deverbal from comb out. First attested in 1915–1920 (sense 1 and sense 2). First attested in 1940 (sense 3).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.