Word.ws English Dictionary

on the tip of one's tongue

on the tip of one's tongue prepositional phrase: known but not quite able to be recalled.

Prepositional phrase

  1. Known but not quite able to be recalled.
    • Her name is on the tip of my tongue: it's Kathy, or Karen, or something.
    • The feeling that a blocked word or name is on the tip of the tongue appears to be a near-universal experience. The cognitive psychologist Bennett Schwarz surveyed speakers of fifty-one different languages and found that forty-five of them contain expressions using "the tongue" to describe...2001, Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory, How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, Houghton Mifflin, →ISBN

on the tip of one's tongue meaning in Tagalog and Persian

on the tip of one's tongue in Tagalog

known but not quite remembered
nasa dulo ng dila

on the tip of one's tongue in Persian

known but not quite remembered
دانستن چیزی ولی فراموشی موقتی آن

Questions about on the tip of one's tongue

What does on the tip of one's tongue mean?
On the tip of one's tongue means known but not quite able to be recalled.
What is on the tip of one's tongue in Tagalog?
On the tip of one's tongue in Tagalog is nasa dulo ng dila. See On the tip of one's tongue meaning in Tagalog.
What part of speech is on the tip of one's tongue?
On the tip of one's tongue is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on the tip of one's tongue in the dictionary

  1. on the tapis
  2. on the telephone
  3. on the tenterhooks
  4. on the tenters
  5. on the tiles
  6. on the tip of one's tongue
  7. on the tools
  8. on the toss of a coin
  9. on the town
  10. on the trot
  11. on the turf

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on the tip of one'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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-on the tip of one's tongue.wav.

Cite this entry: “on the tip of one's tongue.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/on_the_tip_of_one%27s_tongue. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.