Word.ws English Dictionary

up front

up front adjective: open, honest; tending to disclose information; truthful.

Adjective

up front

  1. (idiomatic) Open, honest; tending to disclose information; truthful.
    • I will be up front with you: what you are asking may be costly and difficult.
    • Warning online ticket retailers to be "up front" about fees, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has written to seven of the 19 third-party ticket retailers (TPRs) which did not include their fees in the upfront price. Threatening to take action about hidden charges (known as 'drip pricing'), where...2023 December 27, Mel Holley, “Network News: Regulator to crack down on hidden ticket charges”, in RAIL, number 999, page 6

Adverb

up front

  1. (idiomatic) At the beginning; before anything begins.
    • If we settle on the terms of the deal up front there will be much less arguing later.
  2. At the front.
    • If you don't have anything to do up front, help organize the boxes in back.
  3. In attacking positions.
    • But, rather than make a change up front, Hughes shuffled his defence for this match, replacing Carlos Salcido with Baird, in a move which few would have predicted would prove decisive.2010 December 28, Marc Vesty, “Stoke 0 - 2 Fulham”, in BBC
    • TIn front of a record women's rugby crowd of 81,885, the Red Roses, who had lost the previous two finals to New Zealand, laid that ghost to rest with an assured display built on their power up front and ferocious defence.2025 September 27, Alastair Telfer, “England overpower Canada to win Women's World Cup”, in BBC Sport

Questions about up front

What does up front mean?
Up front means open, honest; tending to disclose information; truthful.
What part of speech is up front?
Up front can be an adjective or an adverb.

Words near up front in the dictionary

  1. up for
  2. up for grabs
  3. up for sale
  4. up for the downstroke
  5. up from
  6. up front
  7. up gaze
  8. up goes the donkey
  9. Up Helly Aa
  10. up here
  11. up hill and down dale

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: up front (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-up front.ogg.

Cite this entry: “up front.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/up_front. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.