take the flak

verb

To be strongly criticised.

“The manager's going to take the flak for taking our star player off the pitch.”

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Meanings

verbtake 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)

present singular third person takes the flak · participle present taking the flak · past took the flak · participle past taken the flak

  1. informalintransitiveTo be strongly criticised.

    The manager's going to take the flak for taking our star player off the pitch.

    1 more example

    “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
Cite this entry
APA

take the flak. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/take%20the%20flak

MLA

“take the flak.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/take%20the%20flak. Accessed November 5, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “take the flak,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/take%20the%20flak.

Source: take the flak on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.