toss and turn
toss and turn verb: to be unable to settle into a comfortable sleeping position.
Verb
toss and turn (third-person singular simple present tosses and turns, present participle tossing and turning, simple past and past participle tossed and turned)
- To be unable to settle into a comfortable sleeping position.
- I didn't get a wink of sleep. I was tossing and turning all night long.
- for, after tossing and turning the greatest part of the night, and tormenting myself with the falsest notions and apprehensions of things, I fell, through mere fatigue, into a kind of delirious doze1749, [John Cleland], “(Please specify the letter or volume)”, in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [Fanny Hill], London: […] [Thomas Parker] for G. Fenton [i.e., Fenton and Ralph Griffiths] […], →OCLC
Forms of toss and turn
| third-person singular present | tosses and turns |
|---|---|
| present participle | tossing and turning |
| past participle | tossed and turned |
| past | tossed and turned |
Questions about toss and turn
- What does toss and turn mean?
- Toss and turn means to be unable to settle into a comfortable sleeping position.
- What part of speech is toss and turn?
- Toss and turn is a verb.
- What is the past tense of toss and turn?
- The past tense of toss and turn is tossed and turned.
Words near toss and turn in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: toss and turn (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-toss and turn.wav.
Cite this entry: “toss and turn.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/toss_and_turn. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.