Word.ws English Dictionary

add insult to injury

add insult to injury verb: to further a loss with mockery or indignity; to worsen an already unfavorable situation.

Verb

add insult to injury (third-person singular simple present adds insult to injury, present participle adding insult to injury, simple past and past participle added insult to injury)

  1. (idiomatic) To further a loss with mockery or indignity; to worsen an already unfavorable situation.
    • As if the hostile takeover weren't enough, to add insult to injury they scrapped ninety percent of our products and replaced them with their own.
    • [...] the line crossed over an iron bridge spanning Ludgate Hill itself [...] neatly obliterating any view of St Paul's from Ludgate Circus and Fleet Street. A thousand people had put their names to a petition against the bridge. To add insult to injury it carried a small thicket of railway signals...2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 52

add insult to injury meaning in Bengali, Arabic and Vietnamese

add insult to injury in Bengali

to further a loss with mockery or indignity
কাটা ঘায়ে নুনের ছিটে kaṭa ghaẏe nuner chiṭe

add insult to injury in Arabic

to further a loss with mockery or indignity
زَادَ الطِّينَ بِلَّةً zāda ṭ-ṭīna billatan

add insult to injury in Vietnamese

to further a loss with mockery or indignity
đổ thêm dầu vào lửa, xát muối vào vết thương

Synonyms of add insult to injury

Forms of add insult to injury

third-person singular presentadds insult to injury
present participleadding insult to injury
past participleadded insult to injury
pastadded insult to injury

Origin of add insult to injury

Derived from the fables of Phaedrus in the first century CE. The story was of a bald man who swats at a fly which has just landed on his head, but instead hits himself on the head. The fly comments, "You wished to kill me for a touch. What will you do to yourself since you have added insult to injury?" (quid facies tibi, Iniuriae qui addideris contumeliam?) The actual wording appears in English from the middle of the 18th century.

Words formed from add insult to injury

Questions about add insult to injury

What does add insult to injury mean?
Add insult to injury means to further a loss with mockery or indignity; to worsen an already unfavorable situation.
What is add insult to injury in Bengali?
Add insult to injury in Bengali is কাটা ঘায়ে নুনের ছিটে (kaṭa ghaẏe nuner chiṭe). See Add insult to injury meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is add insult to injury?
Add insult to injury is a verb.
What is the past tense of add insult to injury?
The past tense of add insult to injury is added insult to injury.

Words near add insult to injury in the dictionary

  1. add flame to the fire
  2. add fuel to fire
  3. add fuel to the fire
  4. add fuel to the flame
  5. add in quadrature
  6. add insult to injury
  7. add oil
  8. add on
  9. add one's twopenn'orth
  10. add ons
  11. add salt to injury

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: add insult to injury (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-add insult to injury.ogg.

Cite this entry: “add insult to injury.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/add_insult_to_injury. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.