wait in the wings

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

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• Audio (US):

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Verb

wait in the wings (third-person singular simple present waits in the wings, present participle waiting in the wings, simple past and past participle waited in the wings)

1. (idiomatic) To be about to become important or central.
   • 1984 February 4, Michael Bronski, “Cats: Straight and Boring”, in Gay Community News, volume 11, number 28, page 17:

     Theire ^[sic] is something obscene about a person spending $40 a seat to be told that redemtion ^[sic] is a spaceship and that "god" is waiting in the wings to forgive the sins of the flesh.

   • 2009 September 1, Lenka, Tawgs Salter, “Trouble Is a Friend”, in Lenka‎^[1], performed by Lenka:

     He's there in the dark, he's there in my heart / He waits in the wings, he's gotta play a part / Trouble is a friend, yeah, trouble is a friend of mine, oh oh!

See also

• -in-waiting

Further reading

• “be waiting in the wings” in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman.
• “in the wings”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “wait in the wings”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.