bear witness

idiom

1
: to show that something exists or is true
+ to
His success bears witness to the value of hard work.
Rising ticket sales bear witness to the band's popularity.
2
formal : to make a statement saying that one saw or knows something
asked to bear witness to the facts
She was accused of bearing false witness at the trial.

Examples of bear witness in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web There were people in Hiroshima who embodied the struggle to bear witness. Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 12 Nov. 2023 In exposing these contradictions, the Rocky Mountaineer both acknowledges—and lets travelers bear witness to—the region’s craggy past, an experience enhanced by the expert storytellers on board. Arati Menon, Condé Nast Traveler, 28 Oct. 2023 How Brooke Shields bears witness to the life of ... Carlos De Loera, Los Angeles Times, 1 Nov. 2023 Even the Hot 100 bears witness to the exclusion of Latin music. Leila Cobo, Billboard, 26 Oct. 2023 And the clinic is only a container: a space in which to talk about and bear witness to suffering, physical or not, and to reckon with the excruciating human contradiction of our longing for meaning and our fear of it. Sara Holdren, Vulture, 12 Sep. 2023 Nowhere else on earth could an average person bear witness to as many top-quality acts as the DJF offers each year without asking so much as a dime for entry. Duante Beddingfield, Detroit Free Press, 31 Aug. 2023 And to have all of you beautiful Black women bearing witness to the story, as the story moves forward, means so much. Felice León, Essence, 17 Oct. 2023 There’s also Daniel’s visual impairment, which, though treated sensitively, hand-waves a facile metaphor regarding the source of knowledge and the nature of bearing witness. Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 12 Oct. 2023 See More

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

Dictionary Entries Near bear witness

Cite this Entry

“Bear witness.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bear%20witness. Accessed 30 Nov. 2023.

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