Word.ws English Dictionary

come clean

come clean verb: to confess; admit the truth.

Verb

come clean (third-person singular simple present comes clean, present participle coming clean, simple past came clean, past participle come clean)

  1. (idiomatic) To confess; admit the truth.
    • "You better come clean, Swan, and tell the whole thing. What was it? Don't talk in circles."1921, B. M. Bower, chapter 6, in Sawtooth Ranch
    • Perhaps it is only fair to come clean at the start and confess that I found J.R.R. Tolkien's Unfinished Tales a disappointment.1977 October 23, John Gardner, “The World Of Tolkien”, in New York Times, retrieved 12 Sep 2013
    Synonyms:
    fess up, own up

come clean meaning in Malayalam

come clean in Malayalam

tell all, tell the truth, make a clean breast of it
എല്ലാം തുറന്നു പറയുക, സത്യംപറയുക, ഏറ്റുപറയുക, ഒന്നും മറയ്ക്കാതെ ഏറ്റുപറയുക, എല്ലാംതുറന്നു സമ്മതിക്കുക, ഉള്ളുതുറക്കുക

Synonyms of come clean

Forms of come clean

third-person singular presentcomes clean
present participlecoming clean
pastcame clean
past participlecome clean

Questions about come clean

What does come clean mean?
Come clean means to confess; admit the truth.
What is come clean in Malayalam?
Come clean in Malayalam is എല്ലാം തുറന്നു പറയുക, സത്യംപറയുക, ഏറ്റുപറയുക. See Come clean meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is come clean?
Come clean is a verb.
What is the past tense of come clean?
The past tense of come clean is came clean.

Words near come clean in the dictionary

  1. come before
  2. come between
  3. come by
  4. Come By Chance
  5. come calling
  6. come clean
  7. come come
  8. come correct
  9. come down
  10. come down cats and dogs
  11. come down in stair rods

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: come clean (page history and authors); come clean (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-come clean.ogg.

Cite this entry: “come clean.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/come_clean. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.