Word.ws English Dictionary

take someone at their word

take someone at their word verb: to take someone literally even though they may not have been serious; to take someone seriously even though they were joking; to take up a challenge that was initially meant as a joke.

Verb

take someone at their word (third-person singular simple present takes someone at their word, present participle taking someone at their word, simple past took someone at their word, past participle taken someone at their word)

  1. (transitive) To take someone literally even though they may not have been serious; to take someone seriously even though they were joking; to take up a challenge that was initially meant as a joke.
  2. (transitive) To take someone's word for it, to believe someone without having the means to check that what they said is true.
    • There’s no way to objectively know if a particular alterhuman individual is actually an otherkin, otherkith, or otherlink. As with matters of gender identity, they have to be taken at their word—sometimes quite literally: it might be a word you've never heard before.2023, Phil Illy, “Autosexuality Beyond Gender”, in Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, Houndstooth Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 447

Forms of take someone at their word

third-person singular presenttakes someone at their word
present participletaking someone at their word
pasttook someone at their word
past participletaken someone at their word

Questions about take someone at their word

What does take someone at their word mean?
Take someone at their word means to take someone literally even though they may not have been serious; to take someone seriously even though they were joking; to take up a challenge that was initially meant as a joke.
What part of speech is take someone at their word?
Take someone at their word is a verb.
What is the past tense of take someone at their word?
The past tense of take someone at their word is took someone at their word.

Words near take someone at their word in the dictionary

  1. take slave
  2. take soil
  3. take some air
  4. take some beating
  5. take some doing
  6. take someone at their word
  7. take someone down the garden path
  8. take someone for all they've got
  9. take someone out back
  10. take someone to brown town
  11. take someone to the grave

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: take someone at their word (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:

Cite this entry: “take someone at their word.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/take_someone_at_their_word. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.