Word.ws English Dictionary

to be honest

to be honest phrase: frankly, honestly.

Phrase

to be honest

  1. (idiomatic, sentence adverb) Frankly, honestly.
    • I don't mind, to be honest.
    • To be honest, he has a bit of a body odor problem, but we haven't yet had an opportunity to tell him gently and privately.
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see to, be, honest.
    • I tried to be honest but still no one believed me.

to be honest meaning in Arabic and Indonesian

to be honest in Arabic

frankly
بِصَراحة biṣarāḥa

to be honest in Indonesian

frankly
sejujurnya, terus terang

Synonyms of to be honest

Questions about to be honest

What does to be honest mean?
To be honest means frankly, honestly.
What is to be honest in Arabic?
To be honest in Arabic is بِصَراحة (biṣarāḥa). See To be honest meaning in Arabic.
What part of speech is to be honest?
To be honest is a phrase.

Words near to be honest in the dictionary

  1. to be continued
  2. to be expected
  3. to be fair
  4. to be frank
  5. to be going on with
  6. to be honest
  7. to be named later
  8. to be precise
  9. to be reckoned with
  10. to be sure
  11. to be truthful

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: to be honest (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-to be honest.ogg.

Cite this entry: “to be honest.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/to_be_honest. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.