Tough-love

verb, slang

verb, slang ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To practice tough love; to treat someone with compassion but applying stringent discipline in order to improve their behavior. informal, transitive

    "The system's got some of our finest men being tough-loved to death!"

Example

More examples

"The system's got some of our finest men being tough-loved to death!"

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