Word.ws English Dictionary

tongue-twister

tongue-twister noun: a phrase that is deliberately designed to be difficult to say correctly, usually because of varying combinations of similar phonemes.

Noun

tongue-twister (plural tongue-twisters)

  1. A phrase that is deliberately designed to be difficult to say correctly, usually because of varying combinations of similar phonemes.
    • The present name being a translation, "in brief," of the original tongue-twister, meaning "the river of the rock"1855, H. Taylor with J. H. Beech, “Report of the Committee on Dysentery”, in The Transactions of the American Medical Association, volume viii, Philadelphia: Collins, page 568

tongue-twister meaning in Tamil, Telugu, Tagalog and Arabic

tongue-twister in Tamil

phrase which is difficult to say
நா பிறழ் nā piṟaḻ

tongue-twister in Telugu

phrase which is difficult to say
టంగ్-ట్విస్టర్ ṭaṅg-ṭvisṭar

tongue-twister in Tagalog

phrase which is difficult to say
pamilipit-dila, pampilipit-dila

tongue-twister in Arabic

phrase which is difficult to say
تَنَافُر tanāfur
More languagesFewer languages
tongue-twister in Indonesian
pembelit lidah

Forms of tongue-twister

pluraltongue-twisters
alternative formtongue twister

Questions about tongue-twister

What does tongue-twister mean?
Tongue-twister means a phrase that is deliberately designed to be difficult to say correctly, usually because of varying combinations of similar phonemes.
What is tongue-twister in Tamil?
Tongue-twister in Tamil is நா பிறழ் (nā piṟaḻ). See Tongue-twister meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is tongue-twister?
Tongue-twister is a noun.
What is the plural of tongue-twister?
The plural of tongue-twister is tongue-twisters.

Words near tongue-twister in the dictionary

  1. tongue-shells
  2. tongue-speaker
  3. tongue-tie
  4. tongue-tied
  5. tongue-ties
  6. tongue-twister
  7. tongue-twisters
  8. tongue-tying
  9. tongue-work
  10. tongue-wrestling
  11. tonguectomies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tongue-twister (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-tongue-twister.wav.

Cite this entry: “tongue-twister.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tongue-twister. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.