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long in the tooth

adj

Etymology

Possibly from the practice of examining the length of horses’ teeth when estimating their ages: an old horse has long, rectangular incisors, and their occlusion angle is steep. Compare don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Definitions

  1. Old

    Old; aged.

    • His cousin was now of more than middle age. . . . She was lean, and yellow, and long in the tooth.
    • So as Microsoft began its 30th year last month, investors wondered whether it's a little long in the tooth.
    • There were four relatively-fast, modern cruisers, the Oleg, Aurora, Zhemchug, and Izumrud... aaand the Dmitrii Donskoi, which was twenty-one years old and getting a bit long in the tooth.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for long in the tooth. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA