Word.ws English Dictionary

bruising up

bruising up is the present participle and gerund of bruise up.

Meaning of bruise up

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

Questions about bruising up

What is bruising up the present participle and gerund of?
Bruising up is the present participle and gerund of bruise up.

Words near bruising up in the dictionary

  1. bruises up
  2. bruisest
  3. bruisewort
  4. bruiseworts
  5. bruising
  6. bruising up
  7. bruisingly
  8. bruisings
  9. bruisy
  10. bruit
  11. bruited

Source and license

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