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TONGUE
Definition of TONGUE
noun
The flexible muscular organ in the mouth that is used to move food around, for tasting and that is moved into various positions to modify the flow of air from the lungs in order to produce different sounds in speech.
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Where it comes from
From Middle English tongue, a late spelling of tong(e), tung(e), from Old English tunge, from Proto-West Germanic *tungā (“tongue”), from Proto-Germanic *tungǭ (“tongue”), from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s (“tongue”). Doublet of langue and lingua. Germanic: West Frisian tonge, Dutch tong, Luxembourgish Zong, German Zunge, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, and Norwegian Nynorsk tunge, Faroese, Icelandic, and Swedish tunga, Gothic 𐍄𐌿𐌲𐌲𐍉 (tuggō). Italic: Asturian and Catalan llengua, Aragonese luenga, French langue, Galician, Italian, and Latin lingua, Leonese llingua, Mirandese lhéngua, Portuguese língua, Spanish lengua. Celtic: Irish teanga. Slavic: Belarusian and Russian язык (jazyk), Bulgarian ези́к (ezík), Czech and Slovak jazyk, Macedonian јазик (jazik), Polish język, Serbo-Croatian jèzik (“tongue”), Slovene jézik, Ukrainian язи́к (jazýk). Indo-Iranic: Persian زبان (zabân), Sanskrit जि॒ह्वा (jihvā́). The expected modern spelling, both phonetically and etymologically, would be tung. Using ⟨on⟩ for ⟨un⟩ was fairly common in Middle English; compare e.g. yong (“young”). The final ⟨gue⟩ arose to prevent tonge being misread with a soft /dʒ/. However, this spelling only became common at a time when the final ⟨e⟩ was already largely silent, so it is not clear why it was not simply dropped instead. Perhaps the spelling was influenced directly by French langue (“tongue”).
Etymology via Wiktionary (CC BY-SA).
OUTLIER scores every word on how unusual it is, and that number is not published. Working it out at the board is the game.
TONGUE in OUTLIER
Players have found it on 22 boards so far. 38 players have found it across Outlier's history.
It first turned up on Day 11, 31 May 2026. The most recent board was Day 99, 27 August 2026. Nobody has seen it on a board for 3 days.
First found by a player on Day 11, 31 May 2026.
Built from these letters
TONGUE starts with T and ends with E. Sorted, its letters read EGNOTU - the shape to hunt for when the grid is scrambled. No letter is used twice, which makes it an isogram.
Words that start TONGUE
Its neighbours in the OUTLIER dictionary - shortest first.
Also seen on Day 11
Could you have found TONGUE?
OUTLIER is a daily word game. One grid, the same grid for everybody, and the words nobody else spots are the ones that pay. This word was on Day 11 - and most players walked straight past it.
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