pull in one's horns

1. 1.

   make a retreat from an earlier commitment or activity

   “We'll have to crawfish out from meeting with him”

   “He backed out of his earlier promise”

   “The aggressive investment company pulled in its horns”

   Synonymsretreatpull backback outback awaycrawfishcrawfish outwithdraw

Questions about pull in one's horns

What does pull in one's horns mean?

pull in one's horns means "make a retreat from an earlier commitment or activity".

What is another word for pull in one's horns?

Close synonyms include retreat, pull back, back out, back away, crawfish. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is pull in one's horns a common word?

pull in one's horns 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.