tough-love
tough-love verb: to practice tough love; to treat someone with compassion but applying stringent discipline in order to improve their behavior.
Verb
tough-love (third-person singular simple present tough-loves, present participle tough-loving, simple past and past participle tough-loved)
- To practice tough love; to treat someone with compassion but applying stringent discipline in order to improve their behavior.
- The system's got some of our finest men being tough-loved to death!1999, Estella Conwill Majozo, Come Out the Wilderness: Memoir of a Black Woman Artist, page 239
- In time, the counselors at the program tough-loved me into acknowledging that I was using my disabilities as an excuse to drink and drug.2000, Malinda Teel, Fortitude: True Stories of True Grit, page 87
Forms of tough-love
| third-person singular present | tough-loves |
|---|---|
| present participle | tough-loving |
| past participle | tough-loved |
| past | tough-loved |
Questions about tough-love
- What does tough-love mean?
- Tough-love means to practice tough love; to treat someone with compassion but applying stringent discipline in order to improve their behavior.
- What part of speech is tough-love?
- Tough-love is a verb.
- What is the past tense of tough-love?
- The past tense of tough-love is tough-loved.
Words near tough-love in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tough-love (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: “tough-love.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tough-love. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.