Word.ws English Dictionary

tore at

tore at is the simple past of tear at.

Meaning of tear at

Verb

tear at (third-person singular simple present tears at, present participle tearing at, simple past tore at, past participle torn at)

  1. To pull at violently.
    • When the house was empty she went from room to room. Ripping sheets from beds and tearing at them and kicking over nightstands and busting mirrors.2021, Michael Farris Smith, chapter 56, in Nick, New York; Boston; London: Little, Brown and Company, page 275
  2. To afflict or aggrieve.
    • The situation tore at his heart.

Questions about tore at

What is tore at the simple past of?
Tore at is the simple past of tear at.

Words near tore at in the dictionary

  1. tore
  2. tore a cat
  3. tore along
  4. tore apart
  5. tore ass
  6. tore at
  7. tore away
  8. tore down
  9. tore into
  10. tore it up
  11. tore off

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tore at (page history and authors); tear at (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: “tore at.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tore_at. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.