Word.ws English Dictionary

big up

big up verb: to increase one's muscle mass.

Verb

big up (third-person singular simple present bigs up, present participle bigging up, simple past and past participle bigged up or (rare) big upped)

  1. (informal, transitive) To increase one's muscle mass.
    • She was bigged up—had a weight-lifter's rippling arms.2007, David Handler, The Bright Silver Star: A Berger and Mitry Mystery
  2. (informal) To become big.
    • Relatively simple multicellular forms had already existed for a hundred million years when the Cambrian began: the explosion had a long fuse, and during this earlier fizzling life experimented with various ways to big up.2012, Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, page 83
    Synonyms:
    enlarge
  3. (slang, transitive) To behave confidently and proudly.
  4. (slang, transitive) To proclaim or exaggerate the importance of; to promote.
    • I want to big up my bro on the mic.
    • They're trying to big themselves up to be more than they are.

Noun

big up (plural big ups)

  1. (slang, also big ups) Significant respect or acclaim.
    • I want to give a big up to my bro on the mic.
    Synonyms:
    props, respect

Synonyms of big up

9 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Forms of big up

Verb
third-person singular presentbigs up
present participlebigging up
past participlebigged up
pastbigged up
past participle (rare)big upped
past (rare)big upped
Noun
pluralbig ups

Questions about big up

What does big up mean?
Big up means to increase one's muscle mass.
What part of speech is big up?
Big up can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of big up?
The past tense of big up is bigged up.

Words near big up in the dictionary

  1. big tree
  2. big trees
  3. big two
  4. big ugly dish
  5. big ugly dishes
  6. big up
  7. big upped
  8. big ups
  9. big wall
  10. big walls
  11. Big Wave Bay

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-big up.ogg.

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