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

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

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

On Thursday night, Green motioned to the TD Garden crowd to pipe down, informing the Boston Celtics’ fans that their team’s third-quarter run would not be enough to stop the Warriors’ era.

From Washington Post • Jun. 17, 2022

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

“They don’t pipe down soon, the whole neighborhood will turn out to watch.”

From "Chains" by Laurie Halse Anderson

Related Words

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