Word.ws English Dictionary

bone in the throat

bone in the throat noun: a source of continuing annoyance; a hindrance.

Noun

bone in the throat (plural bones in the throat)

  1. (idiomatic) A source of continuing annoyance; a hindrance.
    • For an unbelieving face, whether the dull dining countenance of a mayor, or the keen searching countenance of a barrister, is a sad bone in the throat of utterance.1876, George MacDonald, chapter 67, in Thomas Wingfold, Curate
    • The inability to deduct losses from commercial or residential rentals from other real estate income has been a bone in the throat of real estate development companies.1992 January 31, Alan S. Oser, “The Federal Budget: Developers Are Cheered by Talk of New Tax Rules”, in New York Times, retrieved 04 Jun 2016

Forms of bone in the throat

pluralbones in the throat

Questions about bone in the throat

What does bone in the throat mean?
Bone in the throat means a source of continuing annoyance; a hindrance.
What part of speech is bone in the throat?
Bone in the throat is a noun.
What is the plural of bone in the throat?
The plural of bone in the throat is bones in the throat.

Words near bone in the throat in the dictionary

  1. bone heads
  2. bone hurting juice
  3. bone idle
  4. bone in her teeth
  5. bone in one's body
  6. bone in the throat
  7. bone lace
  8. bone laces
  9. bone loss
  10. bone marrow
  11. bone marrows

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bone in the throat (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-bone in the throat.ogg.

Cite this entry: “bone in the throat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bone_in_the_throat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.