Slow-walk

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To delay a request or command, to drag one's feet, to stall, to obstruct, to drag out a process. especially, idiomatic, transitive

    "many of the men were simply standing around and were purposely ‘slow-walking’ the project […] to stretch out the term of employment."

  2. 2
    To punish, to chastise. transitive

Synonyms

All synonyms
drag one's feetslow roll

Example

More examples

"many of the men were simply standing around and were purposely ‘slow-walking’ the project […] to stretch out the term of employment."

Etymology

Etymology 1

Attested since 1973 in Southern dialects of American English; prominent since the late 1990s. Thought by William Safire to derive from a Tennessee term for the walking gait of the Tennessee Walking Horse, which is generally called "flat walk", but sometimes a "slow walk".

Etymology 2

Attested since 1962 in Southern (North and South Carolina) dialects of American English; of unknown origin.

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