tip of the tongue

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an idiom describing the frustrating experience of feeling certain that you know a word or name but being temporarily unable to recall it, with the sense that the word is just on the verge of being accessible — as if it were resting on the very tip of the tongue, about to emerge but somehow not quite making it; the tip-of-the-tongue state (abbreviated TOT by psycholinguists) is a well-documented phenomenon in the psychology of language and memory, studied as a window into how words are stored and retrieved in the mental lexicon; research has shown that during TOT states people can often retrieve partial information about the target word — its first letter, its number of syllables, its sound pattern — suggesting that lexical access is a multi-stage process in which phonological and semantic information are retrieved separately; the idiom is used both to describe this specific word-finding failure and more generally to describe the feeling of knowing something but being unable to express or name it precisely