raw throat
- noun
- The cold air made her raw throat feel even more irritated during the winter months.
Examples
-
Something in the wet made his raw throat numb and cool.
Fiction book (1999) -
Now the thought of food sliding down his raw throat almost made him want to vomit, and if he vomited when he couldn't turn his head, he might choke.
Fiction book (2000) -
She noticed a painful sensation in her raw throat whenever she tried to swallow her tea.
-
After singing for hours, he felt a soreness in his raw throat that made it hard to speak.
Synonyms
A painful feeling in the throat that makes swallowing hard
How Sore
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense 'a sore or irritated throat' is directly and compositionally built from 'raw' (sore, tender) + 'throat' (the anatomical channel), so a learner who knows both words can infer the meaning. This is a productive descriptive use rather than an idiom, and similar descriptive formations occur across languages, making it immediately comprehensible to B1 learners.
Etymology
Raw throat uses raw in the sense of skin that is rubbed, red, and sore, and throat is the front of the neck. So a raw throat feels painful or irritated when you swallow, which is why it means 'a sore or irritated feeling in the throat'.