sit down

sit down (third-person singular simple present sits down, present participle sitting down, simple past and past participle sat down)

1. (intransitive) To assume a sitting position from a standing position.

   Sit down! We have work to do.

   • 1944 July and August, W. G. Chapman, “The First of the Exeter Expresses”, in Railway Magazine, page 215:

     " […] my only chance of sitting down was for the hour we were at dinner. […] ."

2. (transitive or reflexive) To cause to be seated or in a sitting posture; to furnish a seat to.

   Sit your ass down and shut up.

   • 1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “ch. 6, Monk Samson”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, OCLC 191225086, book II (The Ancient Monk):

     Coming home, therefore, I sat me down secretly under the Shrine of St. Edmund, fearing lest our Lord Abbot should seize and imprison me.

   • 1922, A. E. Housman, Astronomy, lines 3-4:

     Oh I will sit me down and weep / For bones in Africa.

3. (figurative) To meet formally at a conference table.
   • 2013 July 19, Timothy Garton Ash, “Where Dr Pangloss meets Machiavelli”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 6, page 18:

     Hidden behind thickets of acronyms and gorse bushes of detail, a new great game is under way across the globe. Some call it geoeconomics, but it's geopolitics too. The current power play consists of an extraordinary range of countries simultaneously sitting down to negotiate big free trade and investment agreements.

4. To assume a low or sunken position.

   The ball scooted off the fairway and sat down in the thick rough.

   As we all climbed aboard, the little boat sat down low in the water.

• (assume a sitting position): be seated, take a pew, take a seat

• sit-down money

• lie down
• set a spell
• set down (transitive)
• sit
• sit up
• stand up

• diswont