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

• 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

However, Bela Bajaria, Netflix's chief creative officer, made comments to Variety in a story published days earlier that shot down the possibility of such a thing coming together. —Nick Romano, Entertainment Weekly, 30 Oct. 2025

Of those, 592 drones and 31 missiles were shot down or otherwise suppressed, the air force said. —David Brennan, ABC News, 30 Oct. 2025

This new bill would allow police in Wisconsin to shoot down or intercept drones. —Steven Martinez, jsonline.com, 28 Oct. 2025

On September 9, Poland shot down Russian drones that had violated its airspace. —Catherine Nicholls, CNN Money, 27 Oct. 2025

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