take up the gauntlet

• take up the gantlet

See throw down the gauntlet. (Cf. French relever le gant)

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take up the gauntlet (third-person singular simple present takes up the gauntlet, present participle taking up the gauntlet, simple past took up the gauntlet, past participle taken up the gauntlet)

1. (idiomatic) To accept a challenge.

   He doesn't read Greek, but he took up the gauntlet and did his best to understand the letter, anyway.

   • 1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 99:

     It was they, the ones without rights or positions, who had taken up the Emperor Wilhelm's gauntlet.