out of gear

1. 1.

   not having gears engaged

   “threw the machine's pinion out of gear”

   Similarungeared

Questions about out of gear

What does out of gear mean?

out of gear means "not having gears engaged".

Is out of gear a common word?

out of gear is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.