Tongue-boring

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A punishment whereby a hole or bore was made in someone's tongue. countable, historical, uncountable

    "Seventeenth-century settlers in the colonies - and usually their children as well - lived in a world that took for granted stocks and tongue-borings, religious proscriptions, fear of witches, and savage repression of the lower orders."

Example

More examples

"Seventeenth-century settlers in the colonies - and usually their children as well - lived in a world that took for granted stocks and tongue-borings, religious proscriptions, fear of witches, and savage repression of the lower orders."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.