Word.ws English Dictionary

bumping up

bumping up is the present participle and gerund of bump up.

Meaning of bump up

Verb

bump up (third-person singular simple present bumps up, present participle bumping up, simple past and past participle bumped up)

  1. (idiomatic, transitive) To increase something suddenly.
  2. (idiomatic, transitive) To promote a person to a higher grade.
  3. (idiomatic, transitive) To give a more prominent place to; to advance position in queue.
  4. (idiomatic, intransitive) To bump into something; to collide with something.
    • It bumps up on the wall here.
  5. (idiomatic, intransitive) To figuratively collide with something; to come into conflict over something.
    • The legalization movement bumped up against political realities.
  6. (transitive) To transfer (recorded footage) from a narrower to a wider tape format.
    Antonyms:
    bump down

Questions about bumping up

What is bumping up the present participle and gerund of?
Bumping up is the present participle and gerund of bump up.

Words near bumping up in the dictionary

  1. bumping off
  2. bumping on
  3. bumping one's gums
  4. bumping purses
  5. bumping uglies
  6. bumping up
  7. bumpingly
  8. bumpings
  9. Bumpit
  10. Bumpits
  11. Bumpitt

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bumping up (page history and authors); bump 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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Cite this entry: “bumping up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bumping_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.