"true colours" meaning in English

See true colours in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Head templates: {{en-noun|p}} true colours pl (plural only)
  1. The real character, belief or intent of a person or group who present a dishonest picture of their nature to the world. Tags: British, plural, plural-only Synonyms: true stripes, true colors Related terms: show one's true colors
    Sense id: en-true_colours-en-noun-eqP9aLkV Categories (other): British English, English entries with incorrect language header, English pluralia tantum

Download JSON data for true colours meaning in English (1.5kB)

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  "lang_code": "en",
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        {
          "text": "The organisation was officially concerned with economic development, but after the memo was leaked people began to see them in their true colours.",
          "type": "example"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1986, Billy Steinberg, Tom Kelly (lyrics and music), “True Colors”, performed by Cyndi Lauper",
          "text": "But I see your true colors / Shining through / I see your true colors / And that's why I love you / So don't be afraid to let them show",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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      "glosses": [
        "The real character, belief or intent of a person or group who present a dishonest picture of their nature to the world."
      ],
      "id": "en-true_colours-en-noun-eqP9aLkV",
      "links": [
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          "word": "show one's true colors"
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          "word": "true stripes"
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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 2024-05-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 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.