English

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Pronunciation

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Verb

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tell the truth (third-person singular simple present tells the truth, present participle telling the truth, simple past and past participle told the truth)

  1. 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

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Phrase

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tell the truth

  1. (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

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  • Used bracketed by punctuation, especially commas, dashes, or parentheses.
  • Less intimate than tell you the truth.

Synonyms

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Translations

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  NODES
see 1