Word.ws English Dictionary

tearing at

tearing at is the present participle and gerund of tear at.

Meaning of tear at

Verb

tear at (third-person singular simple present tears at, present participle tearing at, simple past tore at, past participle torn at)

  1. To pull at violently.
    • When the house was empty she went from room to room. Ripping sheets from beds and tearing at them and kicking over nightstands and busting mirrors.2021, Michael Farris Smith, chapter 56, in Nick, New York; Boston; London: Little, Brown and Company, page 275
  2. To afflict or aggrieve.
    • The situation tore at his heart.

Questions about tearing at

What is tearing at the present participle and gerund of?
Tearing at is the present participle and gerund of tear at.

Words near tearing at in the dictionary

  1. tearing
  2. tearing a cat
  3. tearing along
  4. tearing apart
  5. tearing ass
  6. tearing at
  7. tearing away
  8. tearing down
  9. tearing into
  10. tearing it up
  11. tearing off

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tearing at (page history and authors); tear at (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: “tearing at.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tearing_at. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.