cough up

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English

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Etymology

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From cough + up.

Pronunciation

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  • Audio (US):(file)

Verb

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cough up (third-person singular simple present coughs up, present participle coughing up, simple past and past participle coughed up)

  1. To expel from the lungs, throat, stomach, etc. by coughing.
    He was coughing up blood.
    He was coughing up a lung. [idiomatic, figurative]
  2. (idiomatic, transitive, informal) To reluctantly or unwillingly give.
    1. (of money) To pay or disburse reluctantly (perhaps influenced by coffers of money).
      Do you think he'll be able to cough up the three grand by Tuesday?
      Synonyms: shell out, fork out, fork over
      Coordinate term: come up with
      • 2006, K. M. Soehnlein, You Can Say You Knew Me When, page 240:
        " […] Usually businessmen. Married, middle-aged guys who'll cough up fifty bucks to smoke my pole."
    2. (of other objects) To hand over, give.
      • 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:
        "Anyhow, you go and cough it up and then we shall see."
      • 2013, The Big Bang Theory, season 6, episode 14:
        Cough it up, Cooper.
    3. (intransitive, slang) To confess; to give up information.
  3. (idiomatic) To lose a competition by one's own mistakes, usually near the end of the contest.
    That team had the game won, but they coughed it up in the end.
  4. (transitive, idiomatic) To spill, to fumble.
    • 2011, Tom Fordyce, Rugby World Cup 2011: England 12-19 France‎[1]:
      England had never before come back to win from a margin of more than 12 points, and the errors continued to come thick and fast as Tom Croft became the latest to cough up the ball.

Translations

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See also

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