Tongue definition
- Every tongue has its own tongue print.
- The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body.
- Your tongue has thousands of taste buds located on its surface.
- The tongue is crucial to speaking, eating, and swallowing.
- The front part of the tongue is extremely flexible, and this is the part that is most often associated with the mechanism of speaking.
- The front of your tongue also moves food around your mouth so that you are able to properly chew it up.
- The muscles located in the back of your tongue are responsible for making certain sounds such as the letter "k" and the hard "g" sound.
- Muscles in the back of the tongue help to push food into the esophagus.
- Even when you sleep, your tongue keeps working to push saliva into your throat.
- The tongue heals the quickest of any body part.
- You should brush your tongue to keep it healthy. Bad breath quite frequently comes from your tongue.
- Almost half of all of the bacteria in the mouth live on the surface of the tongue.
- Tongue piercing has been around since ancient times.
- The same word is used for tongue and language in Russian, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Armenian, Polish, Finnish, Irish, and Latin Turkic.
An example of a tongue is the muscular part inside the mouth that helps you taste food.
An example of a tongue is part of a sneaker that gets tucked in on the top of the foot before the shoe is laced up.
An example of a tongue is someone speaking Spanish at home.
An example of to tongue is lightly tasting something with the tip of your tongue that you're not sure you'll like.
The dog gave tongue when the fox came through the hedge.
- The vibrating end of a reed in a wind instrument.
- A flame.
- The flap of material under the laces or buckles of a shoe.
- A spit of land; a promontory.
- A bell clapper.
- The harnessing pole attached to the front axle of a horse-drawn vehicle.
If there is goodness in your heart, it will come to your tongue.
She had no tongue to answer.
Her sharp tongue.
A spit of land tonguing into the bay.
- A radula.
- The proboscis in certain insects, as bees.
- The flap under the laces or strap of a shoe.
- The clapper of a bell.
- The pin of a buckle, etc.
- The pole of a wagon, etc.
- A projecting ridge along the edge of a board, that fits into a corresponding groove on another board to form a tongue-and-groove joint.
- In machines, a projecting flange, rib, etc.
- A thin strip of flexible material, as cane, that produces a musical sound when vibrated, as in a wind instrument.
- A narrow strip of land, ice, etc. extending into a body of water, an intrusion, etc.
- A narrow inlet of water.
- A long, narrow flame.
- The pointer of a scale, etc.
A glib tongue.
The tongue of a buckle, or of a balance.
Playing wind instruments involves tonguing on the reed or mouthpiece.
To tongue boards together.
- If you have white on your tongue, you should get it checked out. It could be a fungus.
- A yellowish coating means that you may have either a fever or a stomach problem.
- A pale pink shade could indicate disease.
- To speak deceitfully; prevaricate or lie.
- To be or keep silent.
- To cause (someone) to speak freely or carelessly or to divulge information.
- To lose the capacity to speak, as from shock.
- On the verge of being recalled or expressed.
- to recover the ability to talk, as after shock or embarrassment
- to refrain from speaking
- prevailing as common gossip
- almost said by someone
- about to be said, esp. because almost but not quite recalled
- to engage in glossolalia
- in a humorously ironic, mocking, or insincere way
Idioms and Phrasal Verbs
Origin of tongue
- Middle English from Old English tunge dn̥ghū- in Indo-European roots
From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- From Middle English tonge, tunge, tung, from Old English tunge, from Proto-Germanic *tungÇ (“tongue") (compare West Frisian tonge, Dutch tong, German Zunge, Danish tunge, Swedish tunga), from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéhâ‚‚s (compare Irish teanga, Latin lingua, Tocharian A/B känt/kantwo, Lithuanian liežùvis, Polish jÄ™zyk 'language, tongue', Armenian Õ¬Õ¥Õ¦Õ¸Ö‚ (lezu), Sanskrit जिह्वा (jihvā́)).
From Wiktionary