"bitter pill to swallow" meaning in English

See bitter pill to swallow in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: en-au-bitter pill to swallow.ogg [Australia] Forms: bitter pills to swallow [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun|bitter pills to swallow|head=bitter pill to swallow}} bitter pill to swallow (plural bitter pills to swallow)
  1. (figurative) Something unpleasant that must be accepted or endured. Tags: figuratively Synonyms: difficult pill to swallow, hard pill to swallow
    Sense id: en-bitter_pill_to_swallow-en-noun-hMIqBxTW Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 76 24
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see bitter pill, swallow. Synonyms: bitter pill Related terms: swallow a bitter pill, sugarcoat the pill
    Sense id: en-bitter_pill_to_swallow-en-noun-aH2ZBsY7

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for bitter pill to swallow meaning in English (2.5kB)

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          "ref": "1886, George Gissing, chapter 10, in Demos: A Story of English Socialism",
          "text": "[T]o see himself dethroned, the object of her contempt, was a bitter pill to swallow.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "1920 May 1, “Amundsen to Try Again for Pole”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "[W]e cast loose from the ice after a very careful inspection which left us no hope whatsoever of penetrating it. […] It was a bitter pill to swallow, but we decided to search for Winter quarters somewhere along the coast.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2006 June 26, Tony Karon, “Inside Iraq's 'Amnesty' Plan”, in Time, archived from the original on 2010-09-03",
          "text": "Giving them amnesty would be a bitter pill for the U.S. to swallow.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        "Something unpleasant that must be accepted or endured."
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      "id": "en-bitter_pill_to_swallow-en-noun-hMIqBxTW",
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        "(figurative) Something unpleasant that must be accepted or endured."
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          "_dis1": "3 97",
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          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "1920 May 1, “Amundsen to Try Again for Pole”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "[W]e cast loose from the ice after a very careful inspection which left us no hope whatsoever of penetrating it. […] It was a bitter pill to swallow, but we decided to search for Winter quarters somewhere along the coast.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
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          "ref": "2006 June 26, Tony Karon, “Inside Iraq's 'Amnesty' Plan”, in Time, archived from the original on 2010-09-03",
          "text": "Giving them amnesty would be a bitter pill for the U.S. to swallow.",
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  "word": "bitter pill to swallow"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). 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.