Word.ws English Dictionary

tough-loving

tough-loving is the present participle and gerund of tough-love.

Meaning of tough-love

Verb

tough-love (third-person singular simple present tough-loves, present participle tough-loving, simple past and past participle tough-loved)

  1. (informal, transitive) 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

Questions about tough-loving

What is tough-loving the present participle and gerund of?
Tough-loving is the present participle and gerund of tough-love.

Words near tough-loving in the dictionary

  1. tough-guy
  2. tough-guyness
  3. tough-love
  4. tough-loved
  5. tough-loves
  6. tough-loving
  7. tough-minded
  8. tough-mindedly
  9. tough-mindedness
  10. tough-pitch
  11. tough-skinned

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tough-loving (page history and authors); 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-loving.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tough-loving. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.