to come home to roost
9
8.0
- idiom
:
volver a uno
- Now the chicken's come home to roost, huh?
- the chickens have come home to roost
Wow, that all came home to roost.
- Wow, that all came home to roost.
- And I think that my prediction is that those chickens are going to come home to roost.
- I mean, now that all of the chickens have come home to roost on crypto and you know, people like SBF, you know, SBF is in jail right now.
- And now the whole world is reaping the whirlwind as all those inflation chickens come home to roost.
- I think also the, the, the a lot of New Labour chickens came home to roost.
Examples
-
Fifty years of politicians buying votes with borrowed money are finally coming home to roost!
Blog text (1) -
Perhaps the biomedical chickens are at last coming home to roost; these things take time.
Academic text (2001) -
You really think after 16 years that little episode will come home to roost?
-
It's funny how it's a whole different story when the circumstances come home to roost.
Blog text (17) -
One of these days, the chickens are gonna come home to roost.
-
Seems like your old nemesis is finally coming home to roost.
-
Sooner or later, the chickens come home to roost, and those who have been fooled get angry.
Blog text (4) -
Now the resentment has come home to roost.
Fiction book (1990) -
The chickens always come home to roost, and they are doing it with a vengeance.
Blog text (3) -
After years of neglecting his health, the consequences finally came home to roost when he fell ill.
Synonyms
1
8.4
Bad things you did before cause problems now
Antonyms
How Severe
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is an idiomatic metaphor (from chickens returning to their roost) where the literal parts 'come', 'home' and 'roost' do not transparently signal 'suffering consequences' to a B1 learner; 'roost' itself is a relatively low-frequency word and the metaphorical transfer requires cultural knowledge. Because the overall meaning ('unpleasant consequences returning to the doer') cannot be predicted from the constituent meanings alone, this expression is opaque.
Etymology
The idiom come home to roost likely comes from farm life, where birds like chickens leave to feed and then settle on a roost at night. If the birds caused damage or made a mess, the farmer had to deal with it when they 'came home to roost', so the phrase now means 'to face the bad results of your actions'.