cough up
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Verb[edit]
cough up (third-person singular simple present coughs up, present participle coughing up, simple past and past participle coughed up)
- To expel from the lungs, throat, etc. by coughing.
- He was coughing up blood.
- He was coughing up a lung. [idiomatic, figurative]
- (idiomatic, transitive, informal) To reluctantly or unwillingly give.
- (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."
- (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.
- (of money) To pay or disburse reluctantly (perhaps influenced by coffers of money).
- (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.
- (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[edit]
to expel by coughing
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to pay money
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