Word.ws English Dictionary

bowl up

bowl up verb: to travel or arrive in a wheeled vehicle.

Verb

bowl up (third-person singular simple present bowls up, present participle bowling up, simple past and past participle bowled up)

  1. (informal, intransitive) To travel or arrive in a wheeled vehicle.
  2. (informal, intransitive) To approach.
    • Thin the masther called out Dinny Moran, an' dhragged him up to one o' the Dublin young ladies, an' bid Dinny be stout an' ax her out to dance wid him. So Dinny, you see, though he was ashamed to make so free wid the lady, still he was afeard not to do as the masther bid him; so, by my conscience...1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 517
  3. (idiomatic, intransitive) To pack the bowl of a pipe with smokable material.
    • When we bowled up, it was at the tail end of a weekend party. There was a lot of smoking going on, there was a little kid, about 12 years old, rapping for everyone; he was great.2016 June 8, John Doran, quoting Tom Sheehan, “Legendary Photographer Tom Sheehan Explains His Iconic Images”, in VICE, archived from the original on 08 Nov 2023
    • Of the many points Musk missed when he bought Twitter, one concerned the standard of content he was seeking to govern. It's like watching a drunk frat boy bowl up and flash Dorothy Parker.2023 October 23, Zoe Williams, “Why is Elon Musk attacking Wikipedia? Because its very existence offends him”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC...
  4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see bowl, up.
    • The five-foot-nine senior bowled up the middle for a 55-yard gain to set up a field goal and then scored off a one-yard plunge in a 10-point third quarter.2006 October 28, “CIS: Western and Queen’s score upsets in OUA playoffs”, in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, ON: The Woodbridge Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 11 Nov 2023

Forms of bowl up

third-person singular presentbowls up
present participlebowling up
past participlebowled up
pastbowled up

Questions about bowl up

What does bowl up mean?
Bowl up means to travel or arrive in a wheeled vehicle.
What part of speech is bowl up?
Bowl up is a verb.
What is the past tense of bowl up?
The past tense of bowl up is bowled up.

Words near bowl up in the dictionary

  1. bowl over
  2. bowl pack
  3. bowl packs
  4. bowl saver
  5. bowl savers
  6. bowl up
  7. bowl wax
  8. bowl-full
  9. bowl-fulls
  10. bowl-off
  11. bowl-offs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bowl 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.

Last updated:

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