Word.ws English Dictionary

bobbing up

bobbing up is the present participle and gerund of bob up.

Meaning of bob up

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.

Questions about bobbing up

What is bobbing up the present participle and gerund of?
Bobbing up is the present participle and gerund of bob up.

Words near bobbing up in the dictionary

  1. bobbiners
  2. bobbinet
  3. bobbinets
  4. bobbing
  5. bobbing under
  6. bobbing up
  7. bobbingly
  8. bobbings
  9. bobbinite
  10. bobbinless
  11. bobbinlike

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bobbing up (page history and authors); 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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Cite this entry: “bobbing up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bobbing_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.