Word.ws English Dictionary

tongue-boring

tongue-boring noun: a punishment whereby a hole or bore was made in someone's tongue.

Noun

tongue-boring (countable and uncountable, plural tongue-borings)

  1. (historical) A punishment whereby a hole or bore was made in someone's tongue.
    • Seventeenth-century settlers in the colonies - and usually their children as well - lived in a world that took for granted stocks and tongue-borings, religious proscriptions, fear of witches, and savage repression of the lower orders.1993, Peter Kolchin, American Slavery (Penguin History, paperback edition, 65)

Forms of tongue-boring

pluraltongue-borings

Questions about tongue-boring

What does tongue-boring mean?
Tongue-boring means a punishment whereby a hole or bore was made in someone's tongue.
What part of speech is tongue-boring?
Tongue-boring is a noun.
What is the plural of tongue-boring?
The plural of tongue-boring is tongue-borings.

Words near tongue-boring in the dictionary

  1. tongue-and-cheek
  2. tongue-and-groove
  3. tongue-and-groove pliers
  4. tongue-bath
  5. tongue-baths
  6. tongue-boring
  7. tongue-borings
  8. tongue-clacker
  9. tongue-clackers
  10. tongue-fence
  11. tongue-fencer

Source and license

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