Talk:up

Usage as adjective

Since when is up an adjective?? I agree the described uses are adjectival, but it remains a preposition in all those cases, if you ask me. Similar with the noun case. henne 11:25, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

I didn’t check all the examples very closely, but up is definitely an adjective in some of its senses. Some examples of up as an adjective: Riding the up elevator; I’m not up on current events; Your time is up; The jig is up; What’s up?; Are you up for a job?; The railroad crossing gate is up; I’m going to put my tent up before dark; The flower seed I planted last month is already up and about to bloom; Can’t you get your kite up?; The sun is up; I was up all night with a bad cold; and so on. The word up is (1) an adverb; (2) a preposition; (3) an adjective; (4) a noun; and (5) a verb. —Stephen 15:07, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Spanish word for up

The Spanish word for up is arriba. Although their are many Spanish words for up this is the one that came up first. --Stardust 13:00, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

What's up?

I think there may be another (adjectival?) sense of "happening", as in "What's up?", "I knew that something must be up". It only occurs in certain phrases, though. — This comment was unsigned.

Possibly so. It is an extension of the "next in sequence" sense, but seems to be different. Thanks. DCDuring TALK 01:08, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

idiomatic usage

UP is one of those awesome English words that have an extrremely rich set of associated idiomatic phrases and usages, many/most of which where once listed on the UP page, and have since been removed. Why? Surely one of the more important functions of a dictionary is to catalog such (delightful) richness of a language. May we not restore an idioms section for UP? Frankatca 13:39, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I concur. For example, "She up and quit." — This comment was unsigned.

Thanks for the comments. I don't normally delete anything without a really good reason and would never delete from up any related, derived, or "see also" terms that had "up" in them. The terms you remember are probably parceled out by part of speech (mostly adjective and adverb in this case) and put them under the "Derived terms" "show/hide" bar. I am distressed that you did not find them there. Some folks have warned me that people aren't used to the show/hides from other most other websites (but Wikipedia has them, too).

We seem to be missing the "up and Xed" expression which I am not sure exactly how to add it. It's a grammatically odd expression. DCDuring TALK 23:01, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

See up and leave. DCDuring TALK 23:06, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

See up and, which behaves in one type of usage as if it were an adverb. DCDuring TALK 01:35, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

See also up#Verb 3rd sense, with "and". DCDuring TALK 01:42, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Archived discussion

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up

Took the first step by adding links for all these phrasal verbs that belong in Derived terms, and whose defs belong on different pages. 59.112.40.194 16:48, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Working it down. Five requested entries. ~20 definitions from DTs incorporated into or checked against DT headword entries. DCDuring TALK 00:38, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Finished def check. merged DTs. split DTs by PoS. moved DTs to PoS. DONE. DCDuring TALK 08:00, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

As Expletive

What about the use of "up" in association with transitive and intransitive verbs where it takes the form of either an adverb or a preposition (hard to tell), but adds nothing to the meaning, hence is an expletive? "Wait up." "Slow up." (Synonymous with "slow down"!) "They stirred up the natives." "Scramble up some eggs." I don't see this covered anywhere in the entry.

Sometimes its function seems to be to lengthen a sentence that otherwise might seem too short to be proper, as in the 1-word imperatives. In other cases it seems to stand for an object's arriving at some condition, but one that is already given by the verb. But if there's any difference in the meaning of the sentence without the "up", it's very, very subtle. Unlike other expletives, I don't think its function is as a phantom entity, as the subject in "It is raining." It's certainly not of the Nixon Oval Office tapes kind of "expletive"! But it formally seems to have to be either an expletive, an adverb, or a preposition when used this way.74.90.250.120 20:34, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Up could be considered an aspect marker (See w:Grammatical aspect and w:Lexical aspect), indicating completion. "Wait up", in one sense, as a command, is a request that a person not merely wait, but wait until the speaker catches up (another example !) with the requestee. There are other senses of wait up: "Don't wait up. I don't know when I'll be home." DCDuring TALK 13:08, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

comparable?

I say that it is comparable. You say down is so this must be as well. He is higher up than you or he is further/farther up is correct isn't it?Jonteemil (talk) 23:34, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Which meaning

Hello, I'm totally lost. Which word + meaning is up in sentence like With 2:22 left in the first, the Blazers were up, 21-19.? Thank you. --Zvolte si prosím jiné jméno (talk) 10:19, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

It's an adjective. It means they were ahead, winning, or leading (in this case by two points). Equinox ◑ 14:12, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

I understand what it means. My question was rather about which of the many meanings listed in the entry page it belongs to. If it is adjective, is it meaning nr. 8? Larger, greater in quantity? Blazers were larger/greater in quantity? It doesn't sound quite right. Isn't maybe some other meaning which is not yet listed? --Zvolte si prosím jiné jméno (talk) 09:45, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Well, more or less that. I've added a second sense underneath to clarify. Equinox ◑ 15:00, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

RFV discussion: October–November 2020

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up

RFV adjective sense:

Facing upwards; facing toward the top.

Put the notebook face up on the table.

Take a break and put your feet up.

Per Wiktionary:Tea_room/2020/October#up_(4), I am unconvinced that "up" is an adjective in either of these examples. Seeking clear adjectival examples, or consensus that the existing examples are in fact adjectival. Mihia (talk) 19:42, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

I should mention that I did consider e.g. "The cards are up" meaning "The cards are face up", but I'm not sure whether we actually say this, or, at least, commonly say it. Mihia (talk) 20:38, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

People sometimes talk about dice as in, "it can be hard to tell which is the up side when rolling a d100". 76.100.241.89

Aha! Thanks for that tip. Searching for those keywords, I think I've cited this. I also cited and added a corresponding sense of down, "facing downwards". - -sche (discuss) 08:14, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Somehow I think it did not occur to me to look for examples where a side or a face is "up", only where the object itself is "up". Anyway, as far as I'm concerned Resolved. Mihia (talk) 10:41, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

RFC discussion: February 2013–November 2020

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up

After working on this a while, it's getting harder to tell the prepositional from the adverbial from the nominal from the adjectival in all of the different sections (I may have actually made things worse). In addition, the role of the term in phrasal verbs doesn't seem to be explicitly addressed at all, which has to be confusing to people trying to look up the phrasal verbs by way of the parts. I realize such problems are rampant among entries for the ubiquitous "little words", but we might as well start somewhere. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:04, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Regarding "up to New York" (adverb #3), could we say that "up" is a preposition? I think that it goes like "I'm going [_PP up [_PP to New York ] ]" and not "I'm going [_AdvP up ] [_PP to New York ]" because we can say "It's up to New York that I'm going" and not *"It's to New York that I'm going up". Same as into which is just in + to. —Internoob 02:02, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

But consider: "We went up in the balloon for a one hour tour." Other prepositions that can follow up include on ("He climbed up on the roof." != "He climbed upon the roof." !!!), with, and over. The following prepositional phrase can be replaced by some locative expressions (eg, here, there, yonder). DCDuring TALK 13:22, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

A way forward for this may be to explicitly include (under the Adverb PoS, I think) non-gloss definitions for usage in phrasal-verb constructions, possibly as subsenses for any corresponding purely adverbial sense. We could then remove phrasal verb usage examples, ie, probably all usage examples involving the most common verbs and replaced them with less colloquial examples using multisyllable verbs that unambiguously do not make phrasal verbs [my hypothesis]. Also, all the usage example that involve synonyms of become need to me moved to the adjective section. DCDuring TALK 11:51, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

• Cleaned up by Mihia (talk • contribs) (good job, by the way!) Darren X. Thorsson (talk) 00:48, 21 November 2020 (UTC)