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psst

interjectionverbcommon in dialogue

  • //psː(t)//

Used to call animals.

interjection

  1. 1

    Used to call animals.

  2. 2

    Used to request silence.

  3. 3

    Used to imply that the speaker is sending secret or whispered information to another person.

    Psst, John, don’t tell anyone, but I’ve got lots of candy stashed away.

  4. 4

    Imitating a spray.

Etymology

Imitative of the similar sounds people use to call animals, such as cats.

verb

  1. 1

    informalTo say psst, to get someone's attention or to communicate with them.

    and I was just rounding the fourth-floor landing when Claudia pssted at me

Forms

past tense
pssted
past participle
pssted
present participle
pssting
third person singular
pssts
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).