Word.ws English Dictionary

cry uncle

cry uncle verb: to beg for mercy; to give up, admit defeat, surrender; indicate submission, such as when wrestling.

Verb

cry uncle (third-person singular simple present cries uncle, present participle crying uncle, simple past and past participle cried uncle)

  1. (US, colloquial) To beg for mercy; to give up, admit defeat, surrender; indicate submission, such as when wrestling.
    • The Powels would serve strong punch and play loud music, and their parties ended when the last guest cried uncle, often a day and half after they began.1976, Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun, New York Review of Books, published 2003, page 158
    • “I said unconditional. It’s where they cry uncle or when they can’t fight any longer and there’s nobody around to cry uncle — that could happen too,” Trump said when pressed by the Guardian aboard Air Force One.2026 March 8, Hugo Lowell, quoting Donald Trump, “Trump vague on Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender’ as he refuses to rule out US troop deployment”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Synonyms of cry uncle

Forms of cry uncle

third-person singular presentcries uncle
present participlecrying uncle
past participlecried uncle
pastcried uncle

Origin of cry uncle

Unknown. Uncle may be an anglicization of Irish anacal (“protection”).

Questions about cry uncle

What does cry uncle mean?
Cry uncle means to beg for mercy; to give up, admit defeat, surrender; indicate submission, such as when wrestling.
What part of speech is cry uncle?
Cry uncle is a verb.
What is the past tense of cry uncle?
The past tense of cry uncle is cried uncle.

Words near cry uncle in the dictionary

  1. cry room
  2. cry rooms
  3. cry someone a river
  4. cry stinking fish
  5. cry the blues
  6. cry uncle
  7. cry up
  8. cry wolf
  9. cry-babies
  10. cry-baby
  11. cry-laugh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cry uncle (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-cry uncle.ogg.

Cite this entry: “cry uncle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cry_uncle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.