Word.ws English Dictionary

bitten one's tongue

bitten one's tongue is the past participle of bite one's tongue.

Meaning of bite one's tongue

Verb

bite one's tongue (third-person singular simple present bites one's tongue, present participle biting one's tongue, simple past bit one's tongue, past participle bitten one's tongue)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To resist the urge to speak out, especially in order to avoid saying something inappropriate or likely to cause a dispute.
    • She wanted to go see a movie called Gigi, which I was not too thrilled about. But being a gentleman, I bit my tongue and said, “Okay.”2011, Mike Pappas, Growing Up the Greek Way in the Big Apple, page 103
    Synonyms:
    bite one's lip

Questions about bitten one's tongue

What is bitten one's tongue the past participle of?
Bitten one's tongue is the past participle of bite one's tongue.

Words near bitten one's tongue in the dictionary

  1. bitten off more than one could chew
  2. bitten on granite
  3. bitten one's lip
  4. bitten one's nails
  5. bitten one's thumb
  6. bitten one's tongue
  7. bitten someone's hand off
  8. bitten someone's head off
  9. bitten the big one
  10. bitten the biscuit
  11. bitten the bullet

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bitten one's tongue (page history and authors); bite one's tongue (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.

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Cite this entry: “bitten one's tongue.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bitten_one%27s_tongue. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.