spin a yarn
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
to tell an entertaining and often untrue story
Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt
kể một câu chuyện giải trí và thường không đúng sự thật
Machine-translated — suggest a fix
Literally: to spin a thread
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
And if a yarn was spun, or a general true story that a man had to have his train fare to get to Newark and he had to pay this and that, you could er get a loan on your wages.
' She tried to spin me a yarn about her husband going back to Poland on holiday in 1950 and being killed in a car crash.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “spin a yarn” mean?
to tell an entertaining and often untrue story Literally: to spin a thread
Is “spin a yarn” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.