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OneKitly

cover-up

nounattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈkʌvɚˌʌp//

An attempt to conceal or disguise something, especially a wrongdoing or a mistake.

noun

  1. 1

    An attempt to conceal or disguise something, especially a wrongdoing or a mistake.

    Truthfulness means no lies and no cover-ups. Compassion means being kind and helpful to others. Forbearance means being able to tolerate and suffer, and not fight back.

    [War metaphors] are used, either consciously or unconsciously, for specific effect and purpose. They are used, not so much as descriptions, but rather to convey additional moral, imaginative or judgmental information. The ubiquitous "war between the sexes" is, in fact, a cover-up of the fact that men, generally, have social power over women.

    Mona: Oh, of course, a cover-up! You know, the whole town would panic if they knew a misunderstood Frankensteinosaurus was on a bloodthirsty rampage! Your secret's safe, Officer. I don't want to cause an international panic any more than you do.

    These divine qualities migrated to Mary because of deficiencies in the theology of God, in Christology and in pneumatology. It makes no lasting sense to retain this as a permanent status quo, using Mary as a cover-up for defective notions of the divine.

  2. 2

    An item of clothing to be worn over a swimsuit while not in the water.

    The women usually wore bikini tops with shorts, swimsuits underneath cover-ups or just swimsuits. Men came in various types of trunks, from traditional boxers, to Speedos, to G-string trunks that showcased their packages.

Etymology

Deverbal from cover up.

Forms

plural
cover-ups
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).