Word.ws English Dictionary

by God's teeth

by God's teeth adverb: i swear.

Adverb

by God's teeth (not comparable)

  1. I swear
    • By God's teeth, I will not grant them liberties which will make me a slave!1850, William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Carefully Collated and Compared with the Editions of Halliwell, Knight, Collier, and Others, with Historical and Critical...
    • By God's teeth, I have been burned by this living devil so many times!2000, Stephen Thomas Knight, Thomas H. Ohlgren, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, TEAMS, →ISBN, page 683

Interjection

  1. An exclamation of surprise or amazement.
    • Once free his immediate reaction was to swear angrily, 'By God's teeth! I've been disgraced. I could swear I've eaten the Devil himself!'1998, Thomas H. Ohlgren, Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English, Sutton, →ISBN, page 91

Synonyms of by God's teeth

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Origin of by God's teeth

See by God and God's teeth.

Questions about by God's teeth

What does by God's teeth mean?
By God's teeth means i swear.
What part of speech is by God's teeth?
By God's teeth can be an adverb or an interjection.

Words near by God's teeth in the dictionary

  1. by gar
  2. by Gemini
  3. by George
  4. by ginger
  5. by God
  6. by God's teeth
  7. by gods
  8. by golly
  9. by gorra
  10. by gosh
  11. by guess or by God

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by God's teeth (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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