drill down

verb

drilled down; drilling down; drills down

transitive + intransitive

: to thoroughly consider or analyze : examine

If you drill down into his platform, it's mostly the same stuff Democrats support, but more of it …

—Jonathan Chait

Although drilling down into all of the complications of the 2007 to 2009 economic and financial crisis is a task requiring more verbosity than a column permits, a quick rundown for context is worthwhile.

—M. Ray Perryman

But we don't have much data that drills down on the voting preferences of people in specific jobs, to distinguish between, say, dishwashers and factory workers.

—Irv Randolph

Matches are based on a lengthy questionnaire that drills down the specifics of your dating preferences and personality.

—Dorothy Pitti

Examples of drill down in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Yet, too many will still drill down and find fault with what Charlie Kirk said at some point in his activism. —Boston Herald Editorial Staff, Boston Herald, 23 Sep. 2025

At the Tres Cantos Netflix Production Center press visit, Martí and Migue Amoedo, Vancouver Media’s co-executive producer and visual designer, drilled down on high-tech innovation via a demo at its Stage 7 virtual production set. —John Hopewell, Variety, 16 Sep. 2025

Gladstone interviewed over 200 experts for this report, and drilled down on national security issues, acknowledging that AI is likely to be a destabilizer on par with the advent of nuclear weapons. —John Werner, Forbes.com, 13 Sep. 2025

But drilling down to specific roles reveals even more dramatic differences. —Srishti Gupta, Interesting Engineering, 12 Aug. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1996, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for drill down

• adown
• blowdown
• breakdown
• countdown
• crackdown
• crosstown
• downtown
• drawdown
• dropdown
• facedown
• godown
• hometown