Word.ws English Dictionary

pull at someone's heartstrings

pull at someone's heartstrings verb: synonym of play on someone's heartstrings.

Verb

pull at someone's heartstrings (third-person singular simple present pulls at someone's heartstrings, present participle pulling at someone's heartstrings, simple past and past participle pulled at someone's heartstrings)

  1. Synonym of play on someone's heartstrings.
    • “These videos don’t pull at the heartstrings; they make these people look like animals in a zoo instead of individuals that need help,” said Dr Geri-Lynn Utter, a clinical psychologist specializing in addiction.2023 December 17, Olivia Empson, quoting Dr Geri-Lynn Utter, “‘Tranq tourism’: alarm in Philadelphia as TikTokers travel to film drug users”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Synonyms of pull at someone's heartstrings

Forms of pull at someone's heartstrings

third-person singular presentpulls at someone's heartstrings
present participlepulling at someone's heartstrings
past participlepulled at someone's heartstrings
pastpulled at someone's heartstrings
alternative formpull at someone's heart strings

Questions about pull at someone's heartstrings

What does pull at someone's heartstrings mean?
Pull at someone's heartstrings means synonym of play on someone's heartstrings.
What part of speech is pull at someone's heartstrings?
Pull at someone's heartstrings is a verb.
What is the past tense of pull at someone's heartstrings?
The past tense of pull at someone's heartstrings is pulled at someone's heartstrings.

Words near pull at someone's heartstrings in the dictionary

  1. pull an all-nighter
  2. pull an oar
  3. pull apart
  4. pull aside
  5. pull at someone's heart strings
  6. pull at someone's heartstrings
  7. pull away
  8. pull away the shoulder
  9. pull back
  10. pull back the curtain
  11. pull buoy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pull at someone's heartstrings (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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