Word.ws English Dictionary

on sufferance

on sufferance prepositional phrase: unwillingly agreed to or barely tolerated.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Unwillingly agreed to or barely tolerated.
    • I wasn't whole-hearted about the decision but couldn't think of a better one, so went along with it on sufferance for the time being.
    • In former days every tavern of repute kept such a room for its own select circle, a club, or society, of habitués, who met every evening, for a pipe and a cheerful glass.[…]Strangers might enter the room, but they were made to feel that they were there on sufferance: they were received with...1892, Walter Besant, chapter III, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC

Questions about on sufferance

What does on sufferance mean?
On sufferance means unwillingly agreed to or barely tolerated.
What part of speech is on sufferance?
On sufferance is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on sufferance in the dictionary

  1. on stage
  2. on steroids
  3. on stream
  4. on strike
  5. on stun
  6. on sufferance
  7. on swole
  8. on sync
  9. on tag
  10. on talking terms
  11. on tap

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on sufferance (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-au-on sufferance.ogg.

Cite this entry: “on sufferance.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/on_sufferance. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.