How to Use admit defeat in a Sentence

admit defeat

idiom
  • But rather than admit defeat in this area and move on, FAM doubles down.
    Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 8 June 2022
  • Others won’t admit defeat, even when there isn’t a soul in line for tickets.
    Debbi Snook, cleveland, 3 Feb. 2023
  • Bosses are clinging to the success of the past, workers refuse to go back, and no one is willing to admit defeat.
    Trey Williams, Fortune, 15 Sep. 2022
  • The Durbin Amendment has not worked out so well for consumers–and Congress should have repealed it in 2017–but Durbin and his acolytes are not about to admit defeat.
    Norbert Michel, Forbes, 17 May 2022
  • Most admit defeat right then and there, halfway knowing that the sale might as well have fallen through already.
    Solomon Thimothy, Forbes, 27 Apr. 2021
  • The presidential election has been called for Joe Biden, but Donald Trump and his team are not quite ready to admit defeat.
    Britni De La Cretaz, refinery29.com, 11 Nov. 2020
  • This is the first national election since the cataclysm of 2020 when Trump refused to admit defeat and tried to stay in power.
    Stephen Collinson, CNN, 7 Nov. 2022
  • The ability to admit defeat and not make excuses is not only important in sports, but in life.
    Washington Post, 18 Nov. 2020
  • Bashmakova, who was clear and direct in her protest, would not admit defeat so easily.
    Markus Ziener, Los Angeles Times, 20 May 2022
  • Never one to admit defeat, Picard amassed his own scrappy crew over the next few episodes for his unauthorized rescue mission.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 21 Jan. 2022
  • To accept the impossibility of treatment is to admit defeat, which most people are loathe to do.
    L.s. Dugdale, STAT, 27 Nov. 2020
  • Instead the drama remains mostly psychological, as hunger takes its toll and the holdouts one by one admit defeat, with the ailing Numo among the last of them.
    David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Sep. 2023
  • Once hitting an ideas wall, amateurs will admit defeat.
    Jodie Cook, Forbes, 1 Sep. 2021
  • Taft won the nomination, yet Roosevelt refused to admit defeat, claiming the entire nominating process was fixed from the start.
    Time, 15 Nov. 2022
  • Either way, the app creators are surprisingly willing to admit defeat.
    Clive Thompson, Wired, 27 July 2021
  • Or even if Trump’s rivals beat him in early primary contests, how will party officials get the former president to admit defeat?
    Chuck Todd, NBC News, 29 June 2023
  • They’ve also been forced to defend that decision because Virginia officials have decided to keep fighting rather than admit defeat.
    Theresa Vargas, Washington Post, 18 Nov. 2023
  • Weeks before Trump left office, still refusing to admit defeat, Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested creation of a commission to assess his fitness to serve.
    Todd J. Gillman, Dallas News, 10 July 2021
  • But giving Biden daily intelligence briefings does not require him to admit defeat.
    The Editors, National Review, 12 Nov. 2020
  • The president is a misinformation superspreader, as The Washington Post and others have documented, and loath to admit defeat.
    Maura Judkis, Washington Post, 14 Nov. 2020
  • Democrats may not admit defeat until the last day of September, when this year’s reconciliation resolution expires.
    Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 15 June 2022
  • After one fight ended ambiguously, Mr. Inoki chose to admit defeat, satisfying Pakistani fans’ urge for a homegrown victor, according to a 2014 profile in Grantland.
    Alex Traub, New York Times, 2 Oct. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'admit defeat.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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