tell the truth
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English[edit]
Pronunciation[edit]
Audio (General Australian): (file)
Verb[edit]
tell the truth (third-person singular simple present tells the truth, present participle telling the truth, simple past and past participle told the truth)
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see tell, truth.
- 2022 September 26, “Putin grants Russian citizenship to U.S. whistleblower Snowden”, in Mark Trevelyan, editor, Reuters[1], archived from the original on 26 September 2022, Europe:
- That year a U.S. appeals court found the program Snowden had exposed was unlawful and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
Translations[edit]
to tell the truth
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Phrase[edit]
- (idiomatic, informal) Used to positively assert the frank honesty of an associated statement of set of statements; equivalent to "to tell the truth".
- 1991, Mike Sirota, Bicycling Through Space and Time:
- Then it sneezed. Considering what it was smelling, that was no surprise. Tell the truth, I'd gotten so used to the jof jof dung that I didn't notice it anymore.
Usage notes[edit]
- Used bracketed by punctuation, especially commas, dashes, or parentheses.
- Less intimate than tell you the truth.
Synonyms[edit]
- (asserting frank honesty of statement): frankly, honestly, tell you the truth
Related terms[edit]
Translations[edit]
asserting the frank honesty of an associated statement
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