Word.ws English Dictionary

face up

face up verb: to confront an unpleasant situation.

Verb

face up (third-person singular simple present faces up, present participle facing up, simple past and past participle faced up)

  1. To confront an unpleasant situation
    • Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts / It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black1966, The Rolling Stones, “Paint It, Black”, in Aftermath

Forms of face up

third-person singular presentfaces up
present participlefacing up
past participlefaced up
pastfaced up

Questions about face up

What does face up mean?
Face up means to confront an unpleasant situation.
What part of speech is face up?
Face up is a verb.
What is the past tense of face up?
The past tense of face up is faced up.

Words near face up in the dictionary

  1. face the facts
  2. face the music
  3. face time
  4. face to face
  5. face turn
  6. face up
  7. face up to
  8. face validities
  9. face validity
  10. face value
  11. face values

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: face up (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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Cite this entry: “face up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/face_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.