bone of contention

1. 1.

   the subject of a dispute

   “the real bone of contention, as you know, is money”

   Broadersubject

Questions about bone of contention

What does bone of contention mean?

bone of contention means "the subject of a dispute".

Is bone of contention a common word?

bone of contention is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.