"take the flak" meaning in English

See take the flak in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Forms: takes the flak [present, singular, third-person], taking the flak [participle, present], took the flak [past], taken the flak [participle, past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|take<,,took,taken> the flak}} take the flak (third-person singular simple present takes the flak, present participle taking the flak, simple past took the flak, past participle taken the flak)
  1. (intransitive, informal) To be strongly criticised. Tags: informal, intransitive

Download JSON data for take the flak meaning in English (2.0kB)

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "takes the flak",
      "tags": [
        "present",
        "singular",
        "third-person"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "taking the flak",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "present"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "took the flak",
      "tags": [
        "past"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "taken the flak",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "past"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "take<,,took,taken> the flak"
      },
      "expansion": "take the flak (third-person singular simple present takes the flak, present participle taking the flak, simple past took the flak, past participle taken the flak)",
      "name": "en-verb"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "verb",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English catchphrases",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
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          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
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          "parents": [
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            "Entry maintenance"
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        {
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          "name": "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
          "parents": [
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        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "The manager's going to take the flak for taking our star player off the pitch.",
          "type": "example"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2022 April 15, Steven Johnson, Nikita Iziev, “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "“When we released GPT-3,” Sam Altman told me over lunch at a restaurant off the Embarcadero in San Francisco, “we took a lot of flak from the community for putting it behind the API”[…]",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "To be strongly criticised."
      ],
      "id": "en-take_the_flak-en-verb-vHpfgsK1",
      "links": [
        [
          "criticised",
          "criticised"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(intransitive, informal) To be strongly criticised."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal",
        "intransitive"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "take the flak"
}
{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "takes the flak",
      "tags": [
        "present",
        "singular",
        "third-person"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "taking the flak",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "present"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "took the flak",
      "tags": [
        "past"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "taken the flak",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "past"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "take<,,took,taken> the flak"
      },
      "expansion": "take the flak (third-person singular simple present takes the flak, present participle taking the flak, simple past took the flak, past participle taken the flak)",
      "name": "en-verb"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "verb",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English catchphrases",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
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        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English terms with usage examples",
        "English verbs"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "The manager's going to take the flak for taking our star player off the pitch.",
          "type": "example"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2022 April 15, Steven Johnson, Nikita Iziev, “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "“When we released GPT-3,” Sam Altman told me over lunch at a restaurant off the Embarcadero in San Francisco, “we took a lot of flak from the community for putting it behind the API”[…]",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "To be strongly criticised."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "criticised",
          "criticised"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(intransitive, informal) To be strongly criticised."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal",
        "intransitive"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "take the flak"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-16 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (e268c0e and 304864d). 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.