No-sell

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To act as if an attack from an opponent had no effect. transitive

    "Powell was doing his best to no-sell a previous exchange. And he was right — Reyes' strikes didn't hurt him or really hit him."

  2. 2
    To shrug off; to withstand without significant reaction or injury. transitive

    "So the bulges would give them a huge amount more buoyancy, which would allow them to navigate narrower channels; the guns would need to be modified so that they could fire at a higher angle, which'd give them better shore-bombardment capability; but, as I say, the decks - and we're not talking internal work; we're literally talking the external deck, just slapping four inches of steel on top of it all, which would, to a certain extent, counteract the extra buoyancy given by the bulges - but the idea was that this four-inch deck on the exterior could no-sell basically any general-purpose bomb that could be dropped on it[…]"

Example

More examples

"Powell was doing his best to no-sell a previous exchange. And he was right — Reyes' strikes didn't hurt him or really hit him."

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