own up

1. Confess, make a full admission, as in Come on, Tim, you'd better own up that you lost the car keys. This idiom uses the verb own in the sense of “acknowledge.” [Colloquial; mid-1800s]

Example Sentences

It asked someone to "own up" for posting a photo of it online, otherwise they would be "tracked down".

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Whether France can hold their own up front is another thing.

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What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia.

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A series of myths keep white America from owning up about race, bias and ourselves.

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Booker said Waltz “denied” and “deflected” rather than own up to his mistakes, something the New Jersey senator said is a “failure of leadership.”

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Related Words

• accept 
• affirm 
• agree 
• allow 
• approve 
• concede 
• confirm 
• declare 
• disclose 
• grant 
• indicate 
• permit 
• recognize 
• reveal 
• talk 
• tell