Word.ws English Dictionary

soft underbelly

soft underbelly noun: a weak spot; a soft spot.

Noun

soft underbelly (plural soft underbellies)

  1. (idiomatic) A weak spot; a soft spot.
    • But supply convoys are the soft underbelly of a powerful, modern military force that the Taliban is incapable of matching in conventional combat.2009 March 30, Mustafa Qadri, “Nato's soft underbelly”, in The Guardian
    • Scientists have known for years that the Thwaites glacier is the soft underbelly of the Antarctic ice sheet, and first found that it was unstable decades ago.2014 May 12, Suzanne Goldenberg, “Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn”, in The Guardian

Forms of soft underbelly

pluralsoft underbellies

Questions about soft underbelly

What does soft underbelly mean?
Soft underbelly means a weak spot; a soft spot.
What part of speech is soft underbelly?
Soft underbelly is a noun.
What is the plural of soft underbelly?
The plural of soft underbelly is soft underbellies.

Words near soft underbelly in the dictionary

  1. soft touch
  2. soft touches
  3. soft toy
  4. soft toys
  5. soft underbellies
  6. soft underbelly
  7. soft vore
  8. soft water
  9. soft waters
  10. soft wheat
  11. soft wheats

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: soft underbelly (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-soft underbelly.ogg.

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