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thong

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//θɒŋ//
  • United States//θɔŋ//
  • //θɑŋ//

A narrow strip of material, typically leather, used to fasten, bind, or secure objects.

noun

  1. 1

    A narrow strip of material, typically leather, used to fasten, bind, or secure objects.

  2. 2

    datedAn item of footwear, usually of rubber, secured by two straps which join to pass between the big toe and its neighbour.

    Because of August he wears shorts and sandals, the Japanese geta sort called thongs.

    T-shirts, cut-offs, and a pair of thongs (T-shirts, cut-offs, and a pair of thongs).

    2006, Peter Murray, David Poole, Grant Jones, Contemporary Issues in Management and Organisational Behaviour, Thomson, page 108, Players turned up for questioning wearing thongs, shorts and T-shirts.

    Thongs are the favoured footwear for many Aussies, especially near the beaches, but most people in the Outback find that they can't put a foot wrong with a tough, nicely worn-in pair or workboots.

  3. 3

    An item of clothing, usually an undergarment or swimwear consisting of very narrow strips designed to cover just the genitals and nothing more.

    She was impressed by her friend's confidence to wear a thong on the crowded beach.

    "Another girl bends over to get her books from her locker. Her hot pink thong sticks out of her low-rise pants."

    "At her friends' urging, Margo ended up buying a purple thong."

  4. 4

    The largest section of a bullwhip constructed of many straps of braided leather.

Etymology

From Middle English thong, thwong, thwang, from Old English þwong, þwang (“thong, band, strap, cord, strip of leather; phylactery”), from Proto-West Germanic *þwangi, from Proto-Germanic *þwangiz, *þwanguz (“coercion, constraint, band, clamp, strap”), from Proto-Indo-European *twenk- (“to squeeze, press, pressure”). Cognate with Scots thwang, thwayng, thang (“thong”), Middle Low German dwenge (“clamp, jaws, steel-trap”), German Zwinge (“vise, clamp”), Danish tvinge (“clamp”), dialectal Norwegian tveng (“shoestrap, shoelace”), Icelandic þvengur (“strap, thong, latchet”).

Forms

plural
thongs
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).