pipe down

British  

verb

1. informal (intr, adverb) to stop talking, making noise, etc

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pipe down Idioms  

1. Stop talking, be quiet, as in I wish you children would pipe down. This idiom is also used as an imperative, as in Pipe down! We want to listen to the opera. It comes from the navy, where the signal for all hands to turn in was sometimes sounded on a whistle or pipe. By 1900 it had been transferred to more general use.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

pipe down

It was also attended by consultant microbiologist Dr Christine Peters, a whistleblower who says she had been flagging concerns about the hospital buildings since 2014 but was advised to "pipe down".

From BBC ● Feb. 5, 2026

Payton walked over to the boo birds and told them to pipe down and to be respectful around the young quarterback’s family.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 31, 2025

Politico's Rachel Bade caught a rare break in McCarthy's otherwise stony facade when he "visibly shushed his members to pipe down."

From Salon ● Feb. 8, 2023

The ploy is quite clear: virtually nobody counts as quite deprived enough to have ambitions for a better world, so everybody should just pipe down.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 7, 2019

Which provoked Jerry G., who was constantly having to turn half-around and bark “Shhh!” or order them, in his puritanical Okie voice, to “please pipe down back there, will you?”

From "The Milagro Beanfield War" by John Nichols

Related Words

• cut off
• gag
• muffle
• mute
• muzzle
• quash
• quell
• squelch
• stifle
• subdue
• suppress