See fess up on Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "Clipping of confess up.",
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{
"ref": "1918, Rex Ellingwood Beach, chapter 26, in The Winds of Chance:",
"text": "\"‛Fess up,\" she persisted. \"Have you boys been quarreling again?\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2008 December 18, Barack Obama, President-elect press conference:",
"text": "And you know, one of the things that I hope is that the American people will find when we make a mistake, we're willing to 'fess up to it and change.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2009 February 26, Roy Furchgott, “You’ve Sold Your Stocks. Now What?”, in New York Times:",
"text": "“I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was happening in the financial industry, and I came to the conclusion that people weren’t fessing up,” he said.",
"type": "quote"
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],
"glosses": [
"To confess to something; to admit something."
],
"id": "en-fess_up-en-verb-CcBKYCsR",
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"(intransitive, colloquial) To confess to something; to admit something."
],
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"word": "own up"
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"word": "'fess up"
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"audio": "En-au-fess up.ogg",
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"ref": "1918, Rex Ellingwood Beach, chapter 26, in The Winds of Chance:",
"text": "\"‛Fess up,\" she persisted. \"Have you boys been quarreling again?\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2008 December 18, Barack Obama, President-elect press conference:",
"text": "And you know, one of the things that I hope is that the American people will find when we make a mistake, we're willing to 'fess up to it and change.",
"type": "quote"
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{
"ref": "2009 February 26, Roy Furchgott, “You’ve Sold Your Stocks. Now What?”, in New York Times:",
"text": "“I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was happening in the financial industry, and I came to the conclusion that people weren’t fessing up,” he said.",
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"To confess to something; to admit something."
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"(intransitive, colloquial) To confess to something; to admit something."
],
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"word": "'fess up"
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"word": "fess up"
}
Download raw JSONL data for fess up meaning in All languages combined (2.4kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-13 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-01 using wiktextract (4ba5975 and 4ed51a5). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.