Englishspeak one's mind
Meaning: To tell someone how one feels or what one thinks.
Example: “At the town meeting, she spoke her mind about the new road.”
Origin: "Mind" here stands for a person's true thoughts and honest opinions, and "speaking" it means putting those private thoughts into open, spoken words rather than holding them back out of caution or politeness. Shakespeare uses almost the exact modern phrase in As You Like It (1599–1600) — "give me leave to speak my mind" — by which point the idiom was clearly already an established, recognizable way of asking permission to be candid, even when what followed might be blunt, unpopular, or uncomfortable for the listener to hear.
More English idioms
- stand one's ground To refuse to retreat or back down.
- stand out in a crowd To be distinguishable from others in a group; distinctive.
- start from scratch To begin again from nothing.
- step on it To hurry.
- stew in one's own juices To suffer the consequences of one's own actions.
- stick to one's guns To be firm in one's resolve or not to alter one's position.
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