Word.ws English Dictionary

brass up

brass up verb: to pay a debt or hand over money.

Verb

brass up (third-person singular simple present brasses up, present participle brassing up, simple past and past participle brassed up)

  1. (slang) To pay a debt or hand over money.
    • "What did he soak him? Five quid?"
      "Yes, sir."
      "And Gussie brassed up and was free?"1949, P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season
  2. (slang, transitive) To shell.
    • The next time I met RSM Simpson was when we were together being 'brassed up' by enemy artillery and mortar […]1982, The Listener, volume 108, page 3
    • I went back in and threw a hand-grenade under the bed and then I brassed up the house. They were dead, of course.1987, Stuart Rintoul, Ashes of Vietnam: Australian voices, page 126

Forms of brass up

third-person singular presentbrasses up
present participlebrassing up
past participlebrassed up
pastbrassed up

Questions about brass up

What does brass up mean?
Brass up means to pay a debt or hand over money.
What part of speech is brass up?
Brass up is a verb.
What is the past tense of brass up?
The past tense of brass up is brassed up.

Words near brass up in the dictionary

  1. brass rings
  2. brass rubbing
  3. brass section
  4. brass sections
  5. brass shakes
  6. brass up
  7. brass wool
  8. brass wools
  9. brass-balled
  10. brass-collar Democrat
  11. brass-collar Democrats

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brass 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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