to pull teeth

1 7.5

To have a lot of trouble getting someone to give an answer or help

idiom

Informal

: sacar información a rastras

Getting him to share his opinion is like pulling teeth.
pulling teeth to get

Examples

You gotta pull teeth to get anything done in this town.

Fiction book (1991)
Besides, I don't need to go out for anything -- don't have to go to the market or cook meals; we have a barber that cuts hair and pulls teeth, and a nurse for ailments.

Fiction book (1991)
Convincing her to participate in the project felt like pulling teeth.
It was pulling teeth to get the committee to agree on a date for the meeting.

Synonyms

to squeeze out

vsto pull teeth

2 4.9

To get something with great effort

is about doing a very hard task, often to get information or cooperation

pulling teeth

vsto pull teeth

Informal

1 8.3

Very difficult and unpleasant to get someone to do something

is the same meaning but expressed in a different grammatical form

Antonyms

to cooperate

543 3.3

To work together with other people to reach the same goal

to facilitate

Formal

187 4.9

To make a task or process easier and help it happen

Surface Forms

pull teeth infinitive

pulled teeth past

pulled teeth past participle

pulling teeth present participle

pulls teeth third person singular

Morphology

pull + teeth

The phrase maps the literal difficulty/pain of pulling teeth onto tasks that are very hard, so a learner who knows 'pull' and 'teeth' can plausibly infer it refers to something difficult. However, the meaning is a conventionalized metaphor (often specifically about extracting information or cooperation), so the full pragmatic nuance is not completely predictable without exposure.

Etymology

The idiom pull teeth comes from the painful picture of a dentist pulling a person's tooth. So when getting an answer or doing a job feels like that, people say it is 'very difficult' or 'hard to get information'.