up

1. 1.

   spatially or metaphorically from a lower to a higher position

   “look up!”

   “the music surged up”

   “the fragments flew upwards”

   “prices soared upwards”

   “upwardly mobile”

   Synonymsupwardsupwardupwardly

   Antonymsdown
2. 2.

   to a higher intensity

   “he turned up the volume”

   Antonymsdown
3. 3.

   nearer to the speaker

   “he walked up and grabbed my lapels”
4. 4.

   to a more central or a more northerly place

   “was transferred up to headquarters”

   “up to Canada for a vacation”

   Antonymsdown
5. 5.

   to a later time

   “they moved the meeting date up”

   “from childhood upward”

   Synonymsupwardsupward

1. 1.

   raise

   “up the ante”

   Broaderincrease

Other forms of up

past tense or participle

upped

present participle

upping

third person

ups·

comparative

uper·

superlative

upest·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about up

What does up mean?

up means "being or moving higher in position or greater in some value; being above a former position or level". That is the primary sense; the word has 14 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in up?

up has 1 syllable: up. In IPA it is /ˈʌp/.

What is another word for up?

Close synonyms include astir, improving, upward, upwards, upward. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of up?

The recorded antonyms are down, down, down, down.

Is up a common word?

up is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with up?

6 words rhyme with up. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.