Word.ws English Dictionary

boss up

boss up verb: to strive to reach one's goals through effort and determination; to start working hard.

Verb

boss up (third-person singular simple present bosses up, present participle bossing up, simple past and past participle bossed up)

  1. (intransitive, slang) To strive to reach one's goals through effort and determination; to start working hard.
    • When life gets you down, boss up and take control.
  2. To modify a corner in sheet lead to avoid leaving a hole in the angle.
  3. (dated, transitive) To manage a household and its servants.

Interjection

  1. (South Africa, obsolete) Take care; look out.

Forms of boss up

third-person singular presentbosses up
present participlebossing up
past participlebossed up
pastbossed up

Origin of boss up

From various senses of boss; first sense possibly devised as a gender-neutral form of man up.

From Dutch pas op from Afrikaans.

Questions about boss up

What does boss up mean?
Boss up means to strive to reach one's goals through effort and determination; to start working hard.
What part of speech is boss up?
Boss up can be a verb or an interjection.
What is the past tense of boss up?
The past tense of boss up is bossed up.

Words near boss up in the dictionary

  1. boss keys
  2. boss man
  3. Boss of the Plains
  4. boss rush
  5. boss rushes
  6. boss up
  7. boss-eyed
  8. boss-ship
  9. bossa
  10. bossa nova
  11. bossa novas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: boss 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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