to face up
38
4.1
- phrasal verb
- /feɪs ʌp/
- Informal
:
afrontar
- We should just face up to the truth about our mistakes.
- face up to reality
- face up to the facts
- need to face up
Should that be granted or should you face up to attempts to do that?
- Should that be granted or should you face up to attempts to do that?
- But you step into the world of sport and you've got to face up to some realities.
- It's for people who don't want to face up to what reality actually looks like.
- What's what, what is the what is the challenge that we need to face up to in the US?
- But the universities too, must face up to some very hard questions that they have thus far avoided.
- Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive, facing up to and resisting of reality, whatever it may be.
- You know, people who have a long history of lying to themselves or concealing from themselves things that they don't want to face up to.
- And we have to face up to who we are, what we've done, where we've failed in order for that to happen.
- And why cannot the court face up to that directly and deal with it as a a bitter fruit of the American experiment?
- And since many human resource programs are not in the know about these patterns, there can be little recourse when you're facing up against this kind of abuse in the workplace.
- You have to face up to the denial that you are under and that is the hardest place of making any change or, or breaking a habit.
- So we're just beginning now to face up to the dramatic implications of quantizing gravity.
- They can't face up to what this is because they and the celebrity class have caused this with their bleeding heart calls or at times blue head screams for more immigration.
- I think that by not facing up to the fact that we don't understand quantum mechanics, we have been held back in our attempts to do other questions in physics.
Examples
-
You gotta face up to it, Mountain.
-
To make the best of it, we will have to face up to critical nuclear policy decisions sooner rather than later.
Academic text (2011) -
And I, I think it's just about, I guess, kind of facing up to your fear in that sense.
-
- And you face up to your future...
-
And I had to face up to that fact.
-
It's time I face up to her.
-
And I think we just have to face up to the fact that as people, we need a moral code.
-
All she needs right now is to face up to the fact that you abandoned her.
Fiction book (2001) -
Apart from taking action on carbon, we need to face up to our engineering challenges.
Blog text (5) -
But the universities too, must face up to some very hard questions that they have thus far avoided.
Synonyms
∞
2.2
To deal with a difficult situation or person
359
4.4
Face a difficult problem or fear directly and bravely
19
4.5
Accept and deal with unpleasant results or criticism for something you did
16
3.7
Accept real facts even when they are painful
9
4.2
Deal with a problem directly instead of avoiding it
4
5.6
To deal with a difficult problem directly and bravely
1
6.3
Face a difficult problem directly and bravely
To face a difficult or unpleasant problem without avoiding it
To deal directly and openly with a problem
Antonyms
How Direct
310
4.1
- Informal
38
4.1
204
3.4
∞
3.5
- US
705
1.4
Surface Forms
Morphology
face + up
The sense 'with the front or surface turned upward' is compositionally derived from face (front/surface) + up (toward the top), so a learner who knows those constituent meanings can infer the MWE. Although the provided entry for 'face' gives a verb sense and 'up' is missing, B1 learners typically know the noun meaning 'face' (front/surface) and the directional 'up', making the phrase transparent.
Etymology
Face up comes from the image of lifting your face to look straight at a problem, moving it up into view. So to face up to a problem means 'to deal with' it directly.