"sugarcoat the pill" meaning in English

See sugarcoat the pill in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Audio: En-au-sugarcoat the pill.ogg [Australia] Forms: sugarcoats the pill [present, singular, third-person], sugarcoating the pill [participle, present], sugarcoated the pill [participle, past], sugarcoated the pill [past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|*}} sugarcoat the pill (third-person singular simple present sugarcoats the pill, present participle sugarcoating the pill, simple past and past participle sugarcoated the pill)
  1. (idiomatic) To make an unpleasant situation more pleasant. Tags: idiomatic Synonyms: gild the pill, sweeten the pill, sugarcoat a bitter pill Related terms: bitter pill to swallow, swallow a bitter pill, sweeten the pot
    Sense id: en-sugarcoat_the_pill-en-verb-Og4awrbM Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for sugarcoat the pill meaning in English (2.5kB)

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        {
          "ref": "1930, Watson White, The Paris that is Paris, page 186",
          "text": "To sugarcoat the pill of payment the receiver of the tax was wont to refer to it disparagingly in the diminutive, calling it “la huchette,” “the little tax on a fish stall.”",
          "type": "quotation"
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          "ref": "2008, Robert Solomon, David Sherman, editors, The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, John Wiley & Sons, page 326",
          "text": "Philosophy supposes that the argument is merely flavored with such imported images to sugarcoat the pill of difficult thinking for those unused to the bitter remedy of rigorous thought.",
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          "ref": "2018 October 20, Zoe Wood, “Shopping malls' desperate decline comes to prime minister’s doorstep”, in The Guardian",
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          "word": "sugarcoat a bitter pill"
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      "word": "sugarcoat a bitter pill"
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  "word": "sugarcoat the pill"
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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.

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