rough and tumble
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
Physically or emotionally demanding and competitive
Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt
Nghiêm khắc và cạnh tranh về thể chất hoặc tình cảm
Machine-translated — suggest a fix
Literally: physically rough and chaotic
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
Gone is the Mondays ' rough and tumble free - for - all of, say, ‘ Wrote For Luck’, replaced by the spliffed - out, laid - back groove and surprisingly sexy undercurrent of ‘ Stinkin ', Thinkin ’’.
There was a game they'd played a few times when Edith was out of the house, a rough - and - tumble sort of thing, perfectly harmless.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed on Wikipedia “Irreversible binomial” (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-29). Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “rough and tumble” mean?
Physically or emotionally demanding and competitive Literally: physically rough and chaotic
Is “rough and tumble” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.