Word.ws English Dictionary

nailbiting

nailbiting is the alternative form of nail-biting.

nailbiting is the alternative form of nail biting.

Meaning of nail-biting

Adjective

nail-biting (comparative more nail-biting, superlative most nail-biting)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) That causes nervous anticipation or suspense.
    • Yet again the phrase does not do justice to the nail-biting 750-mile journey through what is left of the ramparts put up by Genghis Khan, mountain ranges, arid plains, alien landscapes and alien people, stopping at little wooden stations identical to those the length and breadth of Russia but with...2004, Geoffrey Elliott, “On the Road Again”, in From Siberia with Love: A Story of Exile, Revolution and Cigarettes, Methuen Publishing, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 203

Meaning of nail biting

Noun

nail biting (uncountable)

  1. The habit of biting one's fingernails.

Forms of nailbiting

comparativemore nailbiting
superlativemost nailbiting

Questions about nailbiting

What is nailbiting the alternative form of?
Nailbiting is the alternative form of nail-biting.

Words near nailbiting in the dictionary

  1. nailbats
  2. nailbed
  3. nailbeds
  4. nailbiter
  5. nailbiters
  6. nailbiting
  7. nailbomb
  8. nailbomber
  9. nailbombers
  10. nailbombs
  11. nailbourne

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nailbiting (page history and authors); nail-biting (page history and authors); nail biting (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: “nailbiting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nailbiting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.