Word.ws English Dictionary

tone police

tone police verb: to complain about the tone of one or more participants in a debate or discussion, especially one perceived as heated, disrespectful, etc.

Verb

tone police (third-person singular simple present tone polices, present participle tone policing, simple past and past participle tone policed)

  1. (derogatory, slang) To complain about the tone of one or more participants in a debate or discussion, especially one perceived as heated, disrespectful, etc.
    • Many white women will tone police, dominate conversation, and then when challenged follow the following playbook[…]2017, Fobazi M. Ettarh, “Equality is not Pie; Libraries and the Insidiousness of Subtle Racism”, in fobaziettarh.com
    • When his commenters try to tone-police him, [Hasan] Piker will often single one of them out and say, “Congratulations, chatter, you’ve won Woke of the Day.” It’s not a compliment.2025 March 17, Andrew Marantz, “The Battle for the Bros”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN

Forms of tone police

third-person singular presenttone polices
present participletone policing
past participletone policed
pasttone policed

Questions about tone police

What does tone police mean?
Tone police means to complain about the tone of one or more participants in a debate or discussion, especially one perceived as heated, disrespectful, etc.
What part of speech is tone police?
Tone police is a verb.
What is the past tense of tone police?
The past tense of tone police is tone policed.

Words near tone police in the dictionary

  1. tone of voice
  2. tone painting
  3. tone paintings
  4. tone poem
  5. tone poems
  6. tone police
  7. tone policed
  8. tone polices
  9. tone policing
  10. tone ring
  11. tone sandhi

Source and license

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