Word.ws English Dictionary

long in the tooth

long in the tooth adjective: old; aged.

Adjective

long in the tooth

  1. (idiomatic) Old; aged.
    • His cousin was now of more than middle age. . . . She was lean, and yellow, and long in the tooth.1852, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 2, in The History of Henry Esmond, Esq.
    • So as Microsoft began its 30th year last month, investors wondered whether it's a little long in the tooth.2004 May 10, Chris Taylor, “Is Microsoft A Slowpoke?”, in Time, archived from the original on 06 Apr 2008

long in the tooth meaning in Bengali

long in the tooth in Bengali

বয়োবৃদ্ধ

Examples of long in the tooth in a sentence

  • There were four relatively-fast, modern cruisers, the Oleg, Aurora, Zhemchug, and Izumrud... aaand the Dmitrii Donskoi, which was twenty-one years old and getting a bit long in the tooth.2019 March 13, Drachinifel, 10:25 from the start, in The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron - Voyage of the Damned, archived from the original on...
  • For those who are interested, Deaton (1992) remains the best (and most readable) single introduction to the empirics of the canonical permanent income model, though it's now a bit long in the tooth.2024, Jeremy B. Rudd, A Practical Guide to Macroeconomics, page 47:

Synonyms of long in the tooth

Origin of long in the tooth

Possibly from the practice of examining the length of horses’ teeth when estimating their ages: an old horse has long, rectangular incisors, and their occlusion angle is steep. Compare don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Questions about long in the tooth

What does long in the tooth mean?
Long in the tooth means old; aged.
What is long in the tooth in Bengali?
Long in the tooth in Bengali is বয়োবৃদ্ধ. See Long in the tooth meaning in Bengali.
How do you use long in the tooth in a sentence?
There were four relatively-fast, modern cruisers, the Oleg, Aurora, Zhemchug, and Izumrud... aaand the Dmitrii Donskoi, which was twenty-one years old and getting a bit long in the tooth.
What part of speech is long in the tooth?
Long in the tooth is an adjective.

Words near long in the tooth in the dictionary

  1. long hunter
  2. long hunters
  3. long i
  4. long i's
  5. long in coming
  6. long in the tooth
  7. long int
  8. long integer
  9. long integers
  10. long ints
  11. Long Island

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: long in the tooth (page history and authors); long in the tooth (Bengali Wiktionary) (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-us-long in the tooth.ogg, en-au-long in the tooth.ogg.

Cite this entry: “long in the tooth.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/long_in_the_tooth. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.