tongued

1. 1
   adjectivein compounds

   Having a particular manner of speaking, usually specified by a preceding descriptive word.

   The silver-tongued diplomat negotiated his way out of every awkward standoff.

   A loose-tongued informant let the whole plan slip before midnight.

   Note

   The speaking sense almost never stands alone. It needs a word in front to say how someone talks: sharp-tongued, silver-tongued, loose-tongued, with a hyphen joining the pair. Its older relative is Old English ġetynġe, "skilled with speech, talkative, eloquent," which built the judgment into the word itself. The modern form stays neutral and leaves the verdict to whatever comes before it.

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of tongue.

   The trumpeter tongued the staccato passage with crisp precision.

   Workers tongued the planks before fitting the floor together.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs, past tense and past participle, as with any regular verb: the flutist tongued each note; the boards had been tongued for a groove. Most uses are technical, from wind playing to joinery. One is vulgar slang for licking during sex, so context matters. When it means jutting out in long, narrow strips, it shades into the tongue-shaped adjective.

3. 3
   adjective

   Resembling a tongue in shape, typically a flat, narrow projection.

   Geologists mapped the tongued lobes of the glacier as it crept downhill.

   A tongued spit of sand reached out into the calm bay.

4. 4
   adjective

   Having a tongue, the projecting bar at the front that attaches a trailer to a towing vehicle.

   A properly tongued trailer connects to the hitch with a simple coupler.

   The dealer recommended a tongued utility carrier for hauling the mower.

   Oppositetongueless

   Note

   A word from the farmyard and the wagon shed. It describes wagons and farm implements built to be drawn by a tongue, the pole or bar that the pulling force is hitched to. Its natural opposite is tongueless, for equipment made without such a bar. Used of a modern trailer, it carries that older vocabulary of the farm cart into the language of hitches and couplers.

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