tooth
/tuːθ
/- The pain is aggravated by eating, gum chewing, teeth clenching, or yawning.
- Dental caries occur when bacteria destroy the enamel surface of the tooth and cause decay.
- Some malocclusions cannot be treated successfully without removing permanent teeth, though tooth removal is contraindicated in other situations.
Synonyms
- This is not like treaty claims, because the Maori Land Court will have teeth and power in a way that the Waitangi Tribunal does not.
- And the regulatory body that existed before he came to power, has no teeth and can't stop him.
- It goes a little way to doing that, by giving the regulators some power and some teeth.
- A toothed rack rail is laid in the middle of the track on the slopes and the pinions attached to the engine engage with the teeth of the rack bars and enable the engine to pull itself and its load up.
Synonyms
- Or a garden that had plants with teeth, rather than pretty petals.
- The fleshy stems are angled with soft teeth, and no leaves.
- Slick surfaces often needed to be sanded to give them tooth so paint and other materials will adhere better.
Phrases
fight tooth and nail
get (or sink) one's teeth into
in the teeth of
set someone's teeth on edge
Derivatives
toothed
/ adjective ...- It's a documentary type thing speculating how ancient man coped with - and generally killed off - whopping great spiky toothed animals back in the dawn of time.
- They are an aromatic, light yellow-green, with serrated, toothed edges.
- The leaves are oval with pointed tips, toothed at the edges and rough on the upper surface.
tooth-like
- Four miles to the north-east is the island of Boreray and its atmospheric outliers: the whitewashed tooth-like 564 ft Stac Lee and its more northern neighbour, Stac an Armin.
- Ordovician strata are characterized by numerous and diverse trilobites and conodonts (phosphatic fossils with a tooth-like appearance) found in sequences of shale, limestone, dolostone, and sandstone.
- Classical embryology long ago demonstrated that grafting dental epithelium onto non-dental mesenchyme could produce tooth-like structures if the experiment were performed early enough in development.
Origin
Old English tōth (plural tēth), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch tand and German Zahn, from an Indo-European root shared by Latin dent-, Greek odont-.
An Old English word from an ancient root shared by Latin dens, the source of dental (late 16th century), dentist (mid 18th century), trident (late 16th century) ‘three teeth’, and indent. To fight tooth and nail was in the 16th century to fight with tooth and nail. Although in a real fight this would mean ‘by biting and scratching’, the phrase is almost always used of non-physical struggles. To set someone's teeth on edge is to cause them intense irritation. The expression comes from the Bible, and expresses the unpleasant sensation felt when you have bitten into something that is bitter or sour: ‘Every man that hath eaten the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge’ (Jeremiah). See also hen