Meaning & Analysis
To salivate at the sight or thought of something desirable; to long for it keenly—whether for food, goods, money, or other alluring objects.
Insights
Craving appetite
‘Teeth to water’ extends mouth-watering beyond cuisine: the body signals urgent wanting, making desire feel immediate and bodily rather than abstract.
Covetous greed
The phrase often marks grasping at others’ goods; the wet mouth figures acquisitive hunger that reaches past rightful bounds.
Temptation’s pull
Salivation becomes a sign of susceptibility: enticing sights and cues prime the will to yield, dramatizing how stimulus can outpace restraint.
Erotic or aesthetic longing
As with many appetite metaphors, the ‘watering’ can shade into sexual or romantic desire, casting attraction as a readiness to ‘taste’ the beloved.
Somatic moralizing
Early modern writers read bodily signs as ethical tells: a watering mouth betrays inward concupiscence, so physiology becomes a public index of character.
From hunger to coveting
Biblical allusions (e.g., Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard) nudge the idiom from innocent appetite toward the sin of coveting—want turning wrongful when it eyes another’s portion.
Lexical survival
Though ‘teeth to water’ is archaic, its core lives on in ‘mouth-watering.’ The earlier focus on ‘teeth’ sharpens the bite of desire, stressing consumption rather than mere taste.
Social satire of acquisitiveness
Paired with the green-cheese proverb, the idiom lampoons the person who cannot see a novelty without craving it, a comic portrait of consumer itch long before modern advertising.
Cue-triggered wanting
Psychologically, vivid cues (sight, smell, memory) evoke anticipatory salivation and dopaminergic ‘wanting’; the proverb intuits this reflex, casting temptation as a bodily cascade.
Rhetorical Devices
Metonymy
‘Teeth’ stand for the whole mouth and appetite, letting a single part embody the complex system of desire.
Personification
Teeth ‘water’ as if they had agency, animating the scene and making craving seem to act on its own.
Sensory imagery
The wet mouth is tangible and slightly comic, turning abstract longing into a felt, even embarrassing, sensation.
Hyperbole
Desire is exaggerated into a physical overflow (‘run over with water’), heightening urgency and humor.
Idiomatic variation
Forms like ‘set their teeth a-watering’ or ‘my teeth waters’ show a flexible, kinetic phrasing that keeps the image lively in different contexts.
Transcription
Quotations
Though thy teeth water thou eatest not a crume.
My tethe waters to se yonder fayre appels.
Being pressed and griped at home .. keepe there teethe watering at other mens goods.
My teeth still watred with hungar.
He is able to make a Ladies mouth water if she winke not.
He .. brought over with him drie Figs and Raisons .. to set their teeth a watering.
His teeth water to be nibbling at my gold.
At this Robin Good-fellowes teeth did water, for it looked so lovely that hee could not keepe from it.
Ahab's sin was this, when first his teeth began to water after Naboth's vineyard.
To find ones self to long, and teeth to water, for the stomach to ring all in.
My Teeth run over with water at it.
Oh, my little green goose-berry, my teeth waters at ye.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.