Word.ws English Dictionary

bruise up

bruise up verb: to cause bruises to appear, usually by beating or battering.

Verb

bruise up (third-person singular simple present bruises up, present participle bruising up, simple past and past participle bruised up)

  1. (transitive) To cause bruises to appear, usually by beating or battering.
  2. (intransitive) To show or get bruises.
    • Instead, we must find an unworthy substitute for the defeat of a foe in that small grin we quickly suppress when we learn that a beheadphoned texter got hit by a car—no, not seriously injured, just bruised up enough to give him a wake-up call.2021, William Ian Miller, “The Law of Conservation of Good Things”, in Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 34

Forms of bruise up

third-person singular presentbruises up
present participlebruising up
past participlebruised up
pastbruised up

Questions about bruise up

What does bruise up mean?
Bruise up means to cause bruises to appear, usually by beating or battering.
What part of speech is bruise up?
Bruise up is a verb.
What is the past tense of bruise up?
The past tense of bruise up is bruised up.

Words near bruise up in the dictionary

  1. Bruinsmas
  2. bruisability
  3. bruisable
  4. bruisably
  5. bruise
  6. bruise up
  7. bruised
  8. bruised up
  9. bruisedness
  10. bruiseless
  11. bruiselessness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bruise 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-bruise up.wav.

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