Word.ws English Dictionary

ate one's own

ate one's own is the simple past of eat one's own.

Meaning of eat one's own

Verb

eat one's own (third-person singular simple present eats one's own, present participle eating one's own, simple past ate one's own, past participle eaten one's own)

  1. (idiomatic) To turn on and attack members of one's own group or clique.
    • So, in a way, they sat back and watched liberals eat their own—they watched as just deserts advocates undermined the legitimacy of rehabilitation in a way they never could have.2016, Francis T. Cullen, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Correctional Theory: Context and Consequences

Questions about ate one's own

What is ate one's own the simple past of?
Ate one's own is the simple past of eat one's own.

Words near ate one's own in the dictionary

  1. ate one's gun
  2. ate one's hat
  3. ate one's head off
  4. ate one's heart
  5. ate one's heart out
  6. ate one's own
  7. ate one's own dog food
  8. ate one's pride
  9. ate one's seed corn
  10. ate one's terms
  11. ate one's Wheaties

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ate one's own (page history and authors); eat one's own (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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