Word.ws English Dictionary

book up

book up verb: to reserve or book all of something, for example by purchasing all the tickets.

Verb

book up (third-person singular simple present books up, present participle booking up, simple past and past participle booked up)

  1. (transitive) To reserve or book all of something, for example by purchasing all the tickets.
  2. (intransitive) To have all of its tickets or reservations purchased.
    • Flights are beginning to book up as people flee the region.
  3. (slang) To study opening lines in great detail in order to gain an advantage.
    • There would be more extraordinary clock goings on in the big game of the day, Aronian-Firouzja, which began by giving a partial answer to the question of what Alireza Firouzja had been doing for the last five months. He’d been booking up on some old theory!2022 May 8, Colin McGourty, “Superbet Classic 3: Aronian’s great escape, Deac beats Rapport”, in Chess24
  4. (slang, transitive) To study or learn (something).

Forms of book up

third-person singular presentbooks up
present participlebooking up
past participlebooked up
pastbooked up

Words formed from book up

Questions about book up

What does book up mean?
Book up means to reserve or book all of something, for example by purchasing all the tickets.
What part of speech is book up?
Book up is a verb.
What is the past tense of book up?
The past tense of book up is booked up.

Words near book up in the dictionary

  1. book trades
  2. book trough
  3. book troughs
  4. book type
  5. book types
  6. book up
  7. book value
  8. book values
  9. book word
  10. book words
  11. book world

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: book 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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-book up.wav.

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