Word.ws English Dictionary

tone policing

tone policing noun: insistence that another party in a discussion adopts an unconfrontational or relaxed attitude. Also the present participle and gerund of tone police.

Noun

tone policing (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory) Insistence that another party in a discussion adopts an unconfrontational or relaxed attitude.

Also used as

tone policing is also the present participle and gerund of tone police.

Questions about tone policing

What does tone policing mean?
Tone policing means insistence that another party in a discussion adopts an unconfrontational or relaxed attitude.
What part of speech is tone policing?
Tone policing is a noun.

Words near tone policing in the dictionary

  1. tone poem
  2. tone poems
  3. tone police
  4. tone policed
  5. tone polices
  6. tone policing
  7. tone ring
  8. tone sandhi
  9. tone scale
  10. tone scales
  11. tone tag

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tone policing (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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