Word.ws English Dictionary

sting in the tail

sting in the tail noun: something surprising and unpleasant that concludes a chain of events.

Noun

sting in the tail (plural stings in the tail or stings in tails)

  1. Something surprising and unpleasant that concludes a chain of events.
    • The Budget comes with a sting in the tail – future tax increases.
    • The sting in the tail is that an appropriate level of service could be far lower than we see today. With funding best described as tight, we look to be entering a painful period for rail.2022 December 14, Philip Haigh, “Comment: Tightening the purse strings”, in RAIL, number 972, page 3

Forms of sting in the tail

pluralstings in the tail
pluralstings in tails

Questions about sting in the tail

What does sting in the tail mean?
Sting in the tail means something surprising and unpleasant that concludes a chain of events.
What part of speech is sting in the tail?
Sting in the tail is a noun.
What is the plural of sting in the tail?
The plural of sting in the tail is stings in the tail.

Words near sting in the tail in the dictionary

  1. Stinebaugh
  2. Stinebaughs
  3. Stiner
  4. Stiners
  5. sting
  6. sting in the tail
  7. sting like a bee
  8. stingable
  9. stingaree
  10. stingarees
  11. stingbull

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sting in the tail (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: “sting in the tail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sting_in_the_tail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.