Word.ws English Dictionary

pulling teeth

pulling teeth is the present participle and gerund of pull teeth.

Meaning of pull teeth

Verb

pull teeth (third-person singular simple present pulls teeth, present participle pulling teeth, simple past and past participle pulled teeth)

  1. To extract teeth, usually because they are decayed or damaged.
  2. (idiomatic, intransitive) To do something that is especially difficult or effortful.
    • You will probably have to pull teeth to get a straight answer from a car salesman.

Questions about pulling teeth

What is pulling teeth the present participle and gerund of?
Pulling teeth is the present participle and gerund of pull teeth.

Words near pulling teeth in the dictionary

  1. pulling someone's fat out of the fire
  2. pulling someone's leg
  3. pulling someone's plonker
  4. pulling someone's plumes
  5. pulling strings
  6. pulling teeth
  7. pulling the fire alarm
  8. pulling the football
  9. pulling the ladder up after oneself
  10. pulling the ladder up behind oneself
  11. pulling the long bow

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pulling teeth (page history and authors); pull teeth (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: “pulling teeth.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pulling_teeth. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.