Meaning
An honest, intimate conversation in which both people lay their feelings open rather than hiding them. Usually singular - have a heart-to-heart - it implies a serious, private talk about a relationship, a problem or a difficult truth, conducted face to face and without pretence. The word began as an adjective, as in a heart-to-heart talk, before becoming a noun in its own right. Nearly always in have a heart-to-heart with someone. The register is informal but not slang, and the tone is earnest rather than romantic; it often implies the talk is overdue. Regional use: US and UK English; current in all major varieties.
Origin
The OED treats heart-to-heart as one entry - adverb, adjective and noun - with earliest evidence in 1654, in the writing of the clergyman and poet Thomas Washbourne, verified directly on the factsheet; but that use is the adverbial heart to heart, meaning directly or intimately. Merriam-Webster dates the adjective (sincere, frank, as in a heart-to-heart talk) to 1855 and the noun (a heart-to-heart conversation) to 1904 - both verified on its archived entry - while Ammer's idiom dictionary places adverbial heart to heart only in the mid-1900s. Dictionaries thus disagree on how old the conversational use is: the compound is seventeenth-century, but the frank-talk noun is an early-twentieth-century development. The image rests on the old idea of the heart as the seat of feeling - to speak heart to heart is to speak as one feeling being to another, with nothing held back.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- have a heart-to-heart
- heart to heart
- heart-to-heart talk
Usage Examples
- After weeks of sniping, Marta finally sat her brother down for a heart-to-heart about their mother's care.
- The manager called a heart-to-heart with the whole squad after three straight defeats.
- Their heart-to-heart by the kitchen door settled an argument that had run for years.