Word.ws English Dictionary

earwork

earwork noun: the practice of listening.

Noun

earwork (uncountable)

  1. (humorous) The practice of listening.
    • Until the millennium, the buyer's best course of action is to do a little earwork: most boat owners who are happy with their dealer-skipper relationship will talk your ear off about it.1971, MotorBoating, volume 127, number 1, page 153
    • […] he is simply a man who, not understanding very well the nature of the propositions offered over the telephone due to faulty earwork, constantly finds himself involved in the destruction of these monsters in their hellish lairs […]1944, Ernest Hemingway, Second Battle of Britain

Origin of earwork

From ear + work.

Questions about earwork

What does earwork mean?
Earwork means the practice of listening.
What part of speech is earwork?
Earwork is a noun.

Words near earwork in the dictionary

  1. earwitnessed
  2. earwitnesses
  3. earwitnessing
  4. Earwood
  5. Earwoods
  6. earwork
  7. earworm
  8. earworms
  9. earwormy
  10. earwort
  11. earworthy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: earwork (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: “earwork.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/earwork. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.