Word.ws English Dictionary

stick to someone's ribs

stick to someone's ribs verb: to be filling, especially due to having a heavy meaty or glutinous consistency.

Verb

stick to someone's ribs (third-person singular simple present sticks to someone's ribs, present participle sticking to someone's ribs, simple past and past participle stuck to someone's ribs)

  1. (idiomatic) To be filling, especially due to having a heavy meaty or glutinous consistency.
    • When I came to the cold lunch and fried breakfast poor Evans' face fell; he evidently doesn't much believe in the virtue of food, unless it is in the form of a hoosh and has some chance of sticking to one's ribs.1905, Robert F. Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery, Volume 2 (2014 Cambridge University Press edition), p. 274 (Google books)
    • Those two mincemeat tarts hadn't stuck to his ribs the way he'd thought they would.1990, Charlotte MacLeod, The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn (2012 Open Road edition), ch. 12 (Google preview)

Forms of stick to someone's ribs

third-person singular presentsticks to someone's ribs
present participlesticking to someone's ribs
past participlestuck to someone's ribs
paststuck to someone's ribs

Questions about stick to someone's ribs

What does stick to someone's ribs mean?
Stick to someone's ribs means to be filling, especially due to having a heavy meaty or glutinous consistency.
What part of speech is stick to someone's ribs?
Stick to someone's ribs is a verb.
What is the past tense of stick to someone's ribs?
The past tense of stick to someone's ribs is stuck to someone's ribs.

Words near stick to someone's ribs in the dictionary

  1. stick to one's knitting
  2. stick to one's last
  3. stick to one's own knitting
  4. stick to one's post
  5. stick to one's text
  6. stick to someone's ribs
  7. stick together
  8. stick two fingers up
  9. stick up
  10. stick up for
  11. stick up one's ass

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stick to someone's ribs (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-stick to one's ribs.ogg.

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