Word.ws English Dictionary

tongue-tie

tongue-tie noun: ankyloglossia, a congenital oral anomaly.

Noun

tongue-tie (countable and uncountable, plural tongue-ties)

  1. (uncountable) Ankyloglossia, a congenital oral anomaly.
  2. (countable) A piece of cloth used to tie down a horse's tongue, to facilitate breathing etc.

Verb

tongue-tie (third-person singular simple present tongue-ties, present participle tongue-tying, simple past and past participle tongue-tied)

  1. (transitive) To disconcert or fluster (a person) so that they cannot speak coherently.
    • Marry—as the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the ligaments, which tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist!1833, [Charles Lamb], “Preface. By a Friend of the Late Elia.”, in The Last Essays of Elia. […], London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page ix

Forms of tongue-tie

Noun
pluraltongue-ties
alternative formtongue tie
Verb
third-person singular presenttongue-ties
present participletongue-tying
past participletongue-tied
pasttongue-tied

Questions about tongue-tie

What does tongue-tie mean?
Tongue-tie means ankyloglossia, a congenital oral anomaly.
What part of speech is tongue-tie?
Tongue-tie can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of tongue-tie?
The plural of tongue-tie is tongue-ties.

Words near tongue-tie in the dictionary

  1. tongue-punches
  2. tongue-punching
  3. tongue-shell
  4. tongue-shells
  5. tongue-speaker
  6. tongue-tie
  7. tongue-tied
  8. tongue-ties
  9. tongue-twister
  10. tongue-twisters
  11. tongue-tying

Source and license

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