"tough love" meaning in English

See tough love in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-tough love.ogg [Australia]
Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} tough love (uncountable)
  1. (idiomatic) The compassionate use of stringent disciplinary measures, to attempt to improve someone's behavior. Tags: idiomatic, uncountable Translations (Translations): kova rakkaus (Finnish), trudna miłość [feminine] (Polish), twarda miłość [feminine, uncommon] (Polish)
    Sense id: en-tough_love-en-noun-~sgqTatG Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 62 38

Verb

Audio: En-au-tough love.ogg [Australia] Forms: tough loves [present, singular, third-person], tough loving [participle, present], tough loved [participle, past], tough loved [past]
Head templates: {{en-verb}} tough love (third-person singular simple present tough loves, present participle tough loving, simple past and past participle tough loved)
  1. Alternative form of tough-love Tags: alt-of, alternative Alternative form of: tough-love
    Sense id: en-tough_love-en-verb-onVx8LK-

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for tough love meaning in English (4.7kB)

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          "ref": "1995 April 12, Jane E. Brody, “Personal Health: Intervening with someone who drinks too much”, in New York Times, retrieved 2015-04-06",
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          "type": "quotation"
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          "ref": "2002 August 19, Tim Padgett, Andrew Downie, “Bush's Lost Continent”, in Time, retrieved 2015-04-06",
          "text": "[W]hen it came to Latin America's economic travails, Bush adhered to the principle of tough love: no more bailouts.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2023 January 2, Maureen O’Connor, “The Etiquette Guru Who Broke Up With a Boyfriend Over Text”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "And she offers tough love: “There are no ugly women in the world, just lazy ones,” she says during a “Mind Your Manners” hygiene lesson in which she instructs her students to smell their used dental floss to find out if they have bad breath.",
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        "(idiomatic) The compassionate use of stringent disciplinary measures, to attempt to improve someone's behavior."
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          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "Translations",
          "word": "kova rakkaus"
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          "code": "pl",
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          "code": "pl",
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          "tags": [
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          "word": "twarda miłość"
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          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "1997, Anthony Walsh, Correctional assessment, casework, and counseling, page 241",
          "text": "These folks \"tough loved\" Jim into sobriety.",
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          "ref": "2013, Jeffery P Dennis, Queering Teen Culture: All-American Boys and Same-Sex Desire in Film and Television, page 33",
          "text": "The biggest fear of the adults and the audience was that they would fall prey to the gangsters who offered cars, zoot suits, and dough in exchange for a few minor “jobs,” but all they needed was a caring newspaper reporter, cop, or priest to tough love them onto the straight and narrow.",
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          "text": "And she offers tough love: “There are no ugly women in the world, just lazy ones,” she says during a “Mind Your Manners” hygiene lesson in which she instructs her students to smell their used dental floss to find out if they have bad breath.",
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      "code": "fi",
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      "sense": "Translations",
      "word": "kova rakkaus"
    },
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      "code": "pl",
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      "word": "trudna miłość"
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          "type": "quotation"
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          "ref": "1997, Anthony Walsh, Correctional assessment, casework, and counseling, page 241",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.