cough up

Verb

cough up (third-person singular simple present coughs up, present participle coughing up, simple past and past participle coughed up)

1. (transitive) To expel from the lungs, throat, stomach, etc. by coughing.
   • He was coughing up blood.
   • He was coughing up a lung.
2. (idiomatic, informal, transitive) Of money: to pay or disburse reluctantly.
   • Do you think he'll be able to cough up the three grand by Tuesday?
   • Thanks to Jeeves I was not going to be called on to cough up several thousand quid.1923 May 17, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, “Pearls Mean Tears”, in The Inimitable Jeeves, Harmondsworth, Middlesex [London]: Penguin Books, published 1979, →ISBN, page 40

   Synonyms:

   shell out, fork out, fork over

3. (idiomatic, informal, transitive) Of other objects: to hand over, give.
   • By the time you get back the men will all be striking out for the fire, and we ’ll break for the house and collar the dollars. Everybody cough up what matches he ’s got.1909 April, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking”, in Roads of Destiny, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC, page 324
   • “Let me have the report by four o’clock.” “Nothing for us, I suppose?” said the elder woman, with a smile. “You wait, my dear. If we get twenty-five pounds fine it has got to go somewhere—Police Fund, of course, but there may be something over. Anyhow, you go and cough it up and then we shall see.”1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “In which the Notorious Criminal Gets what the British Law Considers to be His Deserts”, in The Land of Mist, New York, N.Y.: A[lbert] L[evi] Burt Company...
4. (idiomatic, informal, intransitive, slang, transitive) To confess; to give up information.
5. (idiomatic) To lose a competition by one's own mistakes, usually near the end of the contest.
   • That team had the game won, but they coughed it up in the end.
6. (idiomatic, transitive) To spill, to fumble.
   • England had never before come back to win from a margin of more than 12 points, and the errors continued to come thick and fast as Tom Croft became the latest to cough up the ball.2011, Tom Fordyce, Rugby World Cup 2011: England 12-19 France