put sth down to sth
— phrasal verb with put uk/pʊt/us/pʊt/verb present participle putting, past tense and past participle put
to think that a problem or situation is caused by a particular thing:
I put the children's bad behaviour down to the fact that they were tired.
More examples
- I'd always put his lack of confidence down to his strange upbringing.
- She did seem rather unhappy, but I just put it down to the pressure she was under at work.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
Concluding and deducing
- analysis
- deduce
- deduction
- diagnosis
- exclude
- extrapolate
- gather
- in the last/final analysis idiom
- induction
- inductive
- infer
- inference
- must
- perceive
- put
- put two and two together idiom
- reason
- syllogism
- two
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