Word.ws English Dictionary

paper tigers

paper tigers is the plural of paper tiger.

Meaning of paper tiger

Noun

paper tiger (plural paper tigers)

  1. (idiomatic) Something or someone that appears powerful, strong or threatening but is in reality weak, ineffective, or unable to withstand challenge.
    • The League of Nations was by this time scarcely even a paper tiger, devoid of credibility since its divisions and pusillanimity had been so clearly laid bare following Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia in the autumn of 1935.2008 August 23, Ian Kershaw, “The twisted road to war”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 05 Jun 2023

Questions about paper tigers

What is paper tigers the plural of?
Paper tigers is the plural of paper tiger.

Words near paper tigers in the dictionary

  1. paper thosai
  2. paper thosais
  3. paper ticket
  4. paper tickets
  5. paper tiger
  6. paper tigers
  7. paper towel
  8. paper toweling
  9. paper towels
  10. paper town
  11. paper towns

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paper tigers (page history and authors); paper tiger (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: “paper tigers.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/paper_tigers. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.