Word.ws English Dictionary

bob up

bob up verb: to rise to the surface; to ascend to the surface and remain floating there.

Verb

bob up (third-person singular simple present bobs up, present participle bobbing up, simple past and past participle bobbed up)

  1. (intransitive) To rise to the surface; to ascend to the surface and remain floating there.
    • He bobbed up and flailed toward the near bank. The weight of his boots and soaked uniform kept pulling him under.2011, Curt Iles, A Spent Bullet: Louisiana 1941, page 125
  2. (broadly, figuratively, intransitive) To appear or arrive unexpectedly.
    • That's when he bobbed up again and ruined everything.

Forms of bob up

third-person singular presentbobs up
present participlebobbing up
past participlebobbed up
pastbobbed up

Questions about bob up

What does bob up mean?
Bob up means to rise to the surface; to ascend to the surface and remain floating there.
What part of speech is bob up?
Bob up is a verb.
What is the past tense of bob up?
The past tense of bob up is bobbed up.

Words near bob up in the dictionary

  1. Bob Lincoln
  2. Bob Lincolns
  3. bob skate
  4. bob skates
  5. bob under
  6. bob up
  7. bob wig
  8. bob wigs
  9. bob wire
  10. bob wires
  11. Bob's your father's brother

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bob 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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