Word.ws English Dictionary

fessing up

fessing up is the present participle and gerund of fess up.

Meaning of fess up

Verb

fess up (third-person singular simple present fesses up, present participle fessing up, simple past and past participle fessed up)

  1. (colloquial, intransitive) To confess to something; to admit something.
    • "‛Fess up," she persisted. "Have you boys been quarreling again?"1918, Rex Ellingwood Beach, chapter 26, in The Winds of Chance
    Synonyms:
    own up

Questions about fessing up

What is fessing up the present participle and gerund of?
Fessing up is the present participle and gerund of fess up.

Words near fessing up in the dictionary

  1. fesses
  2. fesses up
  3. fesseways
  4. fessewise
  5. fessing
  6. fessing up
  7. Fessler
  8. Fesslers
  9. fessways
  10. fesswise
  11. fest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fessing up (page history and authors); fess 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: “fessing up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fessing_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.