Word.ws English Dictionary

bury one's head in the sand

bury one's head in the sand verb: to deliberately ignore the reality of a situation; to pretend a problem does not exist.

Verb

bury one's head in the sand (third-person singular simple present buries one's head in the sand, present participle burying one's head in the sand, simple past and past participle buried one's head in the sand)

  1. (idiomatic) To deliberately ignore the reality of a situation; to pretend a problem does not exist.
    • Now this doubtness is an unhappy state of affairs to the lover of the steam locomotive, but we cannot, like the proverbial ostrich, bury our heads in the sand and refuse to face facts.1950 January, Cecil J. Allen, “British Locomotive Practice and Performance”, in Railway Magazine, page 13

Forms of bury one's head in the sand

third-person singular presentburies one's head in the sand
present participleburying one's head in the sand
past participleburied one's head in the sand
pastburied one's head in the sand

Origin of bury one's head in the sand

A reference to the imagined habit of the ostrich burying its head when threatened. See also head in the sand.

Questions about bury one's head in the sand

What does bury one's head in the sand mean?
Bury one's head in the sand means to deliberately ignore the reality of a situation; to pretend a problem does not exist.
What part of speech is bury one's head in the sand?
Bury one's head in the sand is a verb.
What is the past tense of bury one's head in the sand?
The past tense of bury one's head in the sand is buried one's head in the sand.

Words near bury one's head in the sand in the dictionary

  1. Burwick
  2. Burwood
  3. Burwood East
  4. Burwood Heights
  5. bury
  6. bury one's head in the sand
  7. Bury St Edmunds
  8. bury the hatchet
  9. bury the lead
  10. bury the lede
  11. bury your gays

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bury one's head in the sand (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-bury one's head in the sand.ogg.

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