Word.ws English Dictionary

fly in the face of

fly in the face of verb: to act in a manner highly contrary to; to counteract or contradict.

Verb

fly in the face of (third-person singular simple present flies in the face of, present participle flying in the face of, simple past flew in the face of, past participle flown in the face of)

  1. (idiomatic) To act in a manner highly contrary to; to counteract or contradict.
    • The new design is very edgy and certainly flies in the face of tradition.
    • DB Cargo is clearly upset by the Royal Mail decision. Not only will it lose a valuable customer, but this flies in the face of its own high-profile campaign, called Freight Belongs on Rail.2024 October 30, Andy Comfort, “Can the Royal Mail trains keep on running?”, in RAIL, number 1021, page 60

Forms of fly in the face of

third-person singular presentflies in the face of
present participleflying in the face of
pastflew in the face of
past participleflown in the face of

Questions about fly in the face of

What does fly in the face of mean?
Fly in the face of means to act in a manner highly contrary to; to counteract or contradict.
What part of speech is fly in the face of?
Fly in the face of is a verb.
What is the past tense of fly in the face of?
The past tense of fly in the face of is flew in the face of.

Words near fly in the face of in the dictionary

  1. fly grazing
  2. fly half
  3. fly high
  4. fly in
  5. fly in the buttermilk
  6. fly in the face of
  7. fly in the ointment
  8. fly into
  9. fly into a rage
  10. fly killer
  11. fly killers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fly in the face of (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-fly in the face of.ogg.

Cite this entry: “fly in the face of.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fly_in_the_face_of. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.