Other forms: faces, faced, facing
Your face is the front of your head — eyes, nose, mouth, and everything that moves when you feel something. It is also the first thing anybody reads: you pull a face, you keep a straight face, and you can see it in her face before she says a word.
Anything flat on the outside of something can be a face: the face of a cliff, the face of a clock, the six faces of a dice. The verb splits two ways. You face the window if that is the way you are pointing, and you face a problem if you turn towards it instead of away — which is where face up to it and face the music come from. Face takes its object straight: you face a difficult year, never face to a difficult year. And there is a whole set of phrases about standing in front of other people — lose face, save face, face to face, let's face it, on the face of it.
1nounfaceThe front of a person's head, from the chin to the hair.~57%
“She turned her face to the window.”
synonyms: features
2verbconfrontTo meet something difficult and deal with it rather than turn away.~34%
“They faced a long walk home in the rain.”
3verbpointingTo have your front pointing towards something.~2%
“The flats face the park.”
4nounshapeA flat outer surface — of a cliff, a clock, a coin or a solid shape.~7%
“A cube has six faces.”
synonyms: surface, side
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 139 sentences found in the wild and placed 113 of them on a sense (26 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin faciēs meant form or appearance. It came through Old French and pushed the English word out: before face, this part of you was called anleth. Lose face is younger and borrowed a second time, from Chinese, where the front of your head has long stood for how you look to everybody else.
Middle English
face
English, today
face
Built from
From Middle English face. From Middle English face, from Old French face, from Latin facia, from Latin faciēs (“form, appearance”). a doublet of facies. Displaced native onlete (“face, countenance, appearance”), anleth (“face”), from Old English anwlite, andwlita, compare German Antlitz; Old English ansīen (“face”), Middle English neb (“face, nose”) (from Old English nebb), Middle English leer (“face, cheek, countenance”) (from Old English hlēor), and non-native Middle English vis (“face, appearance, look”) (from Old French vis) and Middle English chere (“face”) from Old French chere. In the sense of face as in reputation, influenced by Chinese 面子 or 臉, both of which mean literally the front of the head and metaphorically one's public image. See lose face.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA