Word.ws English Dictionary

tenterbelly

tenterbelly noun: a glutton.

Noun

tenterbelly (plural tenterbellies)

  1. (obsolete) A glutton.
    • Not with ſweet wine, mutton and potage, as many of thoſe Tenterbellies doe, howſoever they put on Lenten faces, and whatſoever they pretend, but from all manner of meat.1628, Robert Burton, The Anatomy Of Melancholy
    • Bell, the famous Idoll of the Babylonians, was a meere imposture, a Iuggling toye, and a cheating bable, in comparison of this Nicholaitan, Kentish Tenterbelly, the high and mighty Duke All-paunch, was but a fiction to him.1630, John Taylor, The Great Eater of Kent

Forms of tenterbelly

pluraltenterbellies

Origin of tenterbelly

tenter ("to stretch") + belly.

Questions about tenterbelly

What does tenterbelly mean?
Tenterbelly means a glutton.
What part of speech is tenterbelly?
Tenterbelly is a noun.
What is the plural of tenterbelly?
The plural of tenterbelly is tenterbellies.

Words near tenterbelly in the dictionary

  1. tenter-loft
  2. tenter-lofts
  3. tenter-post
  4. tenter-posts
  5. tenterbellies
  6. tenterbelly
  7. Tenterden
  8. tentered
  9. tenterer
  10. tenterers
  11. tenterfield

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tenterbelly (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: “tenterbelly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tenterbelly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.