put out feelers

1. 1.

   make some preliminary investigations or test the waters

   Broaderexplore

Questions about put out feelers

What does put out feelers mean?

put out feelers means "make some preliminary investigations or test the waters".

Is put out feelers a common word?

put out feelers 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.