Word.ws English Dictionary

footlicking

footlicking noun: sycophantic behavior.

Noun

footlicking (uncountable)

  1. sycophantic behavior
  2. The act of licking someone's feet.
    • Perhaps, in some variation of Joe Buck's gay hustler in John Schlesinger's 1969 classic Midnight Cowboy, Anna was being sucked into the footlicking scene for want of making the big time, getting in a good group show, or being able to ...2009, Daniel Nester, How to Be Inappropriate, Catapult, →ISBN

Adjective

footlicking (not comparable)

  1. sycophantic
    • I think it was William the Conqueror, whose portly belly led the fashion among the foot-licking nobles of his court; and in compliment to his majesty they all appeared with ventrical protuberances.1822, The Literary Speculum, volume 2, page 303

Questions about footlicking

What does footlicking mean?
Footlicking means sycophantic behavior.
What part of speech is footlicking?
Footlicking can be a noun or an adjective.

Words near footlicking in the dictionary

  1. footlet
  2. footlets
  3. Footlick
  4. footlicker
  5. footlickers
  6. footlicking
  7. Footlicks
  8. footlight
  9. footlighted
  10. footlights
  11. footlike

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: footlicking (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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