MEANING
To admit that you were wrong, especially after speaking or behaving too confidently.
Use it for
admitting a mistake after boasting; acknowledging that a confident claim was wrong; accepting an embarrassing correction; swallowing pride and admitting defeatAdds the loss of pride involved in acknowledging that an earlier confident claim was wrong. Writing functions: Admitting an embarrassing mistake. Semantic categories (by meaning): Mistakes; Humility; Admission. Contexts: General conversation; Creative prose.
On the page
After calling the design impossible, the engineer had to eat humble pie when it worked.
I predicted an easy win and ended up eating humble pie.
Word forms
- Base
- eat humble pie
Usage notes
Inflect eat: eats humble pie; ate humble pie; eaten humble pie; eating humble pie. Humble pie is not normally pluralized. Register: informal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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