shoot down

verb

shot down; shooting down; shoots down

transitive verb

1

: to cause to fall by shooting

shot down the helicopter

especially : to kill in this way

was shot down in cold blood

2

: to put an end to : defeat, reject

shoot down legislation

3

: deflate, ridicule

4

: discredit sense 2

shoot down a theory

Synonyms of shoot down

• ridicule
• mock
• laugh (at)
• rag on

Examples of shoot down in a Sentence

nowadays the aging activist is routinely shot down in most quarters of the media and dismissed as an irrelevant crank

every one of my fund-raising ideas was shot down by the other club members

Recent Examples on the Web

On the morning of May 7, the mayor of Moscow announced that the Russian air force had shot down hundreds of Ukrainian drones aimed at the city. —Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 11 May 2026

Whose idea gets shot down at 2pm and credited to someone senior at 4pm? —Andy Molinsky, Forbes.com, 10 May 2026

Ukraine’s air defense shot down 92 of the 102 drones Russia launched overnight, the military said. —Los Angeles Times, 7 May 2026

As fate goes, he and Schrenk were shot down on the same day and ended up in the same German POW camps. —John Lauritsen, CBS News, 7 May 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1657, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for shoot down

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