foot-in-mouth disease
/ˈfʊɾ.ɪnˌmaʊθ dəzˈiz/
foot-in-mouth disease noun: a tendency to make remarks that are embarrassingly wrong or inappropriate.
Noun
foot-in-mouth disease (uncountable)
- A tendency to make remarks that are embarrassingly wrong or inappropriate.
- They attempt to straddle all issues and, consequently, when a slip occurs, the result is foot-in-mouth disease.2000, Marvin Rubinstein, Net-wit.com
- Maybe you suffer from foot-in-mouth disease, too, at least occasionally. If so, then I expect you've also learned about the remedy.2004, Craig Jutila, 2-Minute Encouragers for Teachers, page 48
Origin of foot-in-mouth disease
Humorous conflation of foot-and-mouth disease and put one's foot in one's mouth.
Questions about foot-in-mouth disease
- What does foot-in-mouth disease mean?
- Foot-in-mouth disease means a tendency to make remarks that are embarrassingly wrong or inappropriate.
- What part of speech is foot-in-mouth disease?
- Foot-in-mouth disease is a noun.
- How do you pronounce foot-in-mouth disease?
- Foot-in-mouth disease is pronounced /ˈfʊɾ.ɪnˌmaʊθ dəzˈiz/ (US).
Words near foot-in-mouth disease in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: foot-in-mouth disease (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-us-foot-in-mouth disease.ogg, En-au-foot-in-mouth disease.ogg.
Cite this entry: “foot-in-mouth disease.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/foot-in-mouth_disease. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.