take the sting out of something

sting | American Dictionary

sting
verb
us/stɪŋ/past tense and past participlestungus/stʌŋ/

stingverb (HURT)

[ I/T ]
(esp. of insects, plants, and animals) to produce a small but painful injury by making a very small hole in the skin:
[ I ]Why do bees sting?
[ I/T ]
If something stings, it causes you to feel pain:
[ T ]Cold air stung Jack’s lungs.
[ I ]The soap made his eyes sting.
[ I/T ]
If someone’s remarks sting you, they make you feel upset and annoyed:
[ T ]Managers were stung by criticism from environmentalists.
sting
noun[ C ]
us/stɪŋ/

stingnoun[C] (POLICE ACTIVITY)

an operation in which police officers or others pretend to be criminals so they can catch people committing crimes:
Officers set up a sting in which they sold him the jewels, and when he drove off with them they arrested him.

stingnoun[C] (INJURY)

a small but painful injury caused when an insect or animal makes a small hole in the skin:
Bee stings covered his hands.

sting | Business English

sting
verb[ T ]
 informaluk /stɪŋ/us
to charge someone a large amount of money for something, especially when this is unfair:
sting sb for sthThe bank stung me for €50 in charges.
to cause someone to lose money:
We have been stung by rising interest rates.

Examples of sting

sting
In prospect theory, loss delivers this exaggerated sting because losses are measured against the actor's reference point, not the actor's net asset position.
Like a diabolic adder it stings the life of many innocent people and is the burning topic of discussion.
In the case of criminal justice, several stinging defeats for opponents of civil rights galvanized a powerful elite countermovement.
Nor is criterialism, properly or sympathetically understood, vulnerable to the semantic sting.
Excessive ventilation for which the jets of air issuing from the holes in the sting appreciably disturbed the cavity surface, had t o be avoided.
When the larva has been stung the female may withdraw her ovipositor, or wait with it in the cocoon.
I think we are entitled to wonder how desirable that transformation from a carrion-feasting hyena to a mosquito without a sting was.
Unless the female parasitoid prolonged its attack, host feeding wounds on adults could not be differentiated from host stinging alone.
A tick bite was recalled by 56 (71 %) of these patients and an insect sting by four (5 %).
But, and here comes the sting, getting rid of the rationality axiom as a foundational postulate does not get rid of all problems.
Musical stories take the sting out of the repetition so often used in modern teaching to reinforce certain concepts.
The females would not sting the host larvae in any stage, and showed no interest in them.
In either case, the semantic sting argument fails.
There is stinging disappointment on her face and in her eyes.
Both larval parasitoids leave a scar on the host cuticle after stinging the larvae.
See all examples of sting
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.