Word.ws English Dictionary

bracing up

bracing up is the present participle and gerund of brace up.

Meaning of brace up

Verb

brace up (third-person singular simple present braces up, present participle bracing up, simple past and past participle braced up)

  1. (transitive) To strengthen with bracing material.
    • Ed wired the house, dug a basement with pick and shovel, braced it up, bricked it, and installed a furnace and a coal chute […]2007, Robert Coram, American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day
  2. (intransitive) To become more optimistic.
  3. (ambitransitive) To strengthen (oneself), become stronger or more resilient.
    • The humor of my proposition appealed more strongly to Miss Trevor than I had looked for, and from that time forward she became her old self again;[…]. Our table in the dining-room became again the abode of scintillating wit and caustic repartee, Farrar bracing up to his old standard, and the demand...1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter VIII, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

Questions about bracing up

What is bracing up the present participle and gerund of?
Bracing up is the present participle and gerund of brace up.

Words near bracing up in the dictionary

  1. bracing aback
  2. bracing about
  3. bracing by
  4. bracing in
  5. bracing sharp
  6. bracing up
  7. bracingly
  8. bracingness
  9. bracings
  10. braciola
  11. braciole

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bracing up (page history and authors); brace 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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