Word.ws English Dictionary

take the flak

take the flak verb: to be strongly criticised.

Verb

take the flak (third-person singular simple present takes the flak, present participle taking the flak, simple past took the flak, past participle taken the flak)

  1. (informal, intransitive) To be strongly criticised.
    • The manager's going to take the flak for taking our star player off the pitch.
    • “When we released GPT-3,” Sam Altman told me over lunch at a restaurant off the Embarcadero in San Francisco, “we took a lot of flak from the community for putting it behind the API”[…]2022 April 15, Steven Johnson, Nikita Iziev, “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Forms of take the flak

third-person singular presenttakes the flak
present participletaking the flak
pasttook the flak
past participletaken the flak

Questions about take the flak

What does take the flak mean?
Take the flak means to be strongly criticised.
What part of speech is take the flak?
Take the flak is a verb.
What is the past tense of take the flak?
The past tense of take the flak is took the flak.

Words near take the flak in the dictionary

  1. take the easy way out
  2. take the edge off
  3. take the fall
  4. take the field
  5. take the fifth
  6. take the flak
  7. take the floor
  8. take the front seat
  9. take the game to
  10. take the gap
  11. take the gilt off the gingerbread

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: take the flak (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 the flak.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/take_the_flak. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.