fiery-tongued

English

Adjective

fiery-tongued (comparative more fiery-tongued, superlative most fiery-tongued)

  1. (mythology, folklore) That breathes fire; fire-breathing.
    • 1891, Horace Mann, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man: A Lecture Delivered Before The Boston Mercantile Library Association on Its 29th Anniversary, New York: Columbian Publishing Company, page 77:
      Obey, if you will, the law of the baser passions, - appetite, pride, selfishness, - but know, they will scourge you into realms where the air is hot with fiery-tongued scorpions, that will sting and torment your soul into unutterable agonies!
  2. (figurative) That speaks or preaches with zeal, vivid imagery, and uncompromising urgency; vitriolic; acerbic.
    • 1895, John Burroughs, The Writings of John Burroughs, volume VI, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, page 59:
      Ossian survives in him: behold that melancholy retrospect, that gloom, that melodious wail. And especially, as I have said, do his immediate ancestors survive in him, his sturdy, toiling, fiery-tongued, clannish yeoman progenitors: all are summed up here; this is the net result available for literature in the nineteenth century.

Adverb

fiery-tongued (comparative more fiery-tongued, superlative most fiery-tongued)

  1. (mythology, folklore) Breathing fire.
    • 1961, Norma Lorre Goodrich, “Beowulf”, in The Medieval Myths, New York: The New American Library, page 48:
      He would never again streak fiery-tongued across a midnight sky spreading death and shuddering fear.
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.