Word.ws English Dictionary

banged up

banged up is the simple past and past participle of bang up.

Adjective

banged up (not comparable)

  1. (informal) Spending time in prison or jail.
    • My uncle has been banged up for ten years now; I haven't seen him in five.
  2. (informal) Physically injured or wounded.
    • “Well I can tell you why I didn’t. It wasn’t necessary, Mr. Finch. She was mighty banged up. Something sho‘ happened, it was obvious.”1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC
    • "It does hurt, not just my ankle but all over. I'm banged up like hell. But I'm not, you know, hurt. Like needing an X Ray or the infirmary or whatever."2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance, paperback edition, Fourth Estate, page 164

Meaning of bang up

Verb

bang up (third-person singular simple present bangs up, present participle banging up, simple past and past participle banged up)

  1. (informal, transitive) To damage.
    • He banged up his new car last night.
  2. (informal, transitive) To put someone in prison, or into their individual cell.
    • He was so drunk that the police banged him up for the night.
    Synonyms:
    dub up
  3. (intransitive, slang) To inject a recreational drug.
    • I knew some fellows who banged up, I mean heroin, but I kind of stayed away from it.1971, Army Digest, volume 26, page 31

See all 4 meanings of bang up

Synonyms of banged up

5 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Questions about banged up

What does banged up mean?
Banged up means spending time in prison or jail.
What is banged up the simple past and past participle of?
Banged up is the simple past and past participle of bang up.
What part of speech is banged up?
Banged up is an adjective.

Words near banged up in the dictionary

  1. banged out
  2. banged some heads together
  3. banged the door down
  4. banged the drum for
  5. banged to rights
  6. banged up
  7. bangedst
  8. Bangel
  9. Bangemann wave
  10. banger
  11. banger race

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: banged up (page history and authors); bang up (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “banged up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/banged_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.