on the face of it

idiom

: from only what is known at first
On the face of it, her proposal seems ridiculous—maybe it will sound better when we learn more about it.

Examples of on the face of it in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web An upset on the face of it, Branham (23-5), the No. 1 seed in the Northern California Division II bracket, getting beat at home by No. 16 seed Clovis East. Glenn Reeves, The Mercury News, 28 Feb. 2024 And yet, on the face of it, nobody has followed up on the alarm - although there are whispers in the intelligence community. Melik Kaylan, Forbes, 24 Feb. 2024 Governments should, on the face of it, be better primed for managing novel risks and technologies than ever before. Mustafa Suleyman, WIRED, 6 Sep. 2023 The second book is a work of literary criticism that is, on the face of it, not much concerned with anatomy. Washington Post Staff, Washington Post, 14 Dec. 2023 But the point is, this is something that’s, on the face of it — this is not a problem in set theory. Steven Strogatz, Quanta Magazine, 19 Apr. 2023 This week’s inflation figures marked the denouement of yet another shift in the market narrative, and what on the face of it was a wild overreaction to some good inflation figures. James MacKintosh, WSJ, 17 Nov. 2023 The company is unbundling Teams from its productivity suites, which on the face of it should settle a European Commission investigation launched a month ago, following a complaint from Slack. David Meyer, Fortune, 31 Aug. 2023 Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth, which opened the New York Film Festival on Friday, isn't one of those radical reworkings on the face of it; his script stays almost entirely faithful to the original text. Leah Greenblatt, EW.com, 25 Sep. 2021

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'on the face of it.' 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 on the face of it

Cite this Entry

“On the face of it.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on%20the%20face%20of%20it. Accessed 29 Mar. 2024.

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