Word.ws English Dictionary

loosening someone's tongue

loosening someone's tongue is the present participle of loosen someone's tongue.

Meaning of loosen someone's tongue

Verb

loosen someone's tongue (third-person singular simple present loosens someone's tongue, present participle loosening someone's tongue, simple past and past participle loosened someone's tongue)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To cause one to speak more freely; to cause one to discuss a subject that would not usually be discussed.
    • He made a long stay in the dining-room after dinner, and, I fear, took an unusual quantity of wine, but not enough to loosen his tongue: for when he came in and found me quietly occupied with my book, too busy to lift my head on his entrance, he merely murmured an expression of suppressed...1848, Anne Brontë, chapter 24, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Questions about loosening someone's tongue

What is loosening someone's tongue the present participle of?
Loosening someone's tongue is the present participle of loosen someone's tongue.

Words near loosening someone's tongue in the dictionary

  1. looseness
  2. loosenesses
  3. loosenest
  4. looseneth
  5. loosening
  6. loosening someone's tongue
  7. loosening the apron strings
  8. loosening the purse strings
  9. loosening up
  10. loosening ups
  11. loosenings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: loosening someone's tongue (page history and authors); loosen someone's tongue (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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