Word.ws English Dictionary

tongue-work

tongue-work noun: babble, chatter; conversation.

Noun

tongue-work (uncountable)

  1. (archaic) Babble, chatter; conversation.
    • I wonder whether you and he have had any tongue-work already.1857, George Borrow, Romany Rye
    • If a man takes to tongue-work it's all over with him. 'Everything's wrong,' says he. That's a big text. But does he want to make everything right? Not he. He'd lose his text.1866, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XX, in Felix Holt, the Radical […], volume II, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, page 78

Questions about tongue-work

What does tongue-work mean?
Tongue-work means babble, chatter; conversation.
What part of speech is tongue-work?
Tongue-work is a noun.

Words near tongue-work in the dictionary

  1. tongue-tied
  2. tongue-ties
  3. tongue-twister
  4. tongue-twisters
  5. tongue-tying
  6. tongue-work
  7. tongue-wrestling
  8. tonguectomies
  9. tonguectomy
  10. tongued
  11. tonguedness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tongue-work (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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