bury the hatchet

To agree to end a quarrel: “Jerry and Cindy had been avoiding each other since the divorce, but I saw them together this morning, so they must have buried the hatchet.”

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Idioms and Phrases

Make peace; settle one's differences. For example, Toward the end of the year, the roommates finally decided to bury the hatchet . Although some believe this term comes from a Native American custom for declaring peace between warring tribes, others say it comes from hang up one's hatchet , a term dating from the early 1300s (well before Columbus landed in the New World). The word bury replaced hang up in the 1700s.

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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