call up

Verb

call up (third-person singular simple present calls up, present participle calling up, simple past and past participle called up)

1. (transitive) To retrieve from personal or computer memory.
   • I remember looking in the card catalogue of the main Public Library under "Homosexuality" and not daring to call up the books because "they" might think I was one.1976 April 17, A. Nolder Gay, “The View from the Closet”, in Gay Community News, page 13
   • The Emoji Movie takes place in “Textopolis,” where emojis maintain their assigned expression with no deviation, waiting to be called up for their on-screen appearance as needed.2017 July 27, Tony Leondis, “The Emoji Movie is Inside Out crossed with a Sony commercial and dunked in toxic ooze”, in The Onion AV Club
2. (transitive) To summon (someone) to report for military service.
   • “I don’t know if I’ll go to war or not, I don’t know what process the guys who are being called up are going through,” he wrote. “At the moment, our army is fully coping with the offensives of Russian soldiers and equipment.”2022 March 4, John Branch, “He Won an Olympic Silver for Ukraine. Now He’s Hiding in a Kyiv Garage.”, in The New York Times
3. (transitive) To select e.g. to a sports squad.
   • Dean Ashton was called up to the England squad for the first time.
4. (idiomatic, transitive) To call on the telephone.
   • You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham, though. I read it last summer. It’s a pretty good book and all, but I wouldn’t want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don’t know. He just isn't the kind of a guy I'd want to call up, that's all.1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 25
   • The other night, you wouldn't believe
     The dream I just had about you and me
     I called you up, but we both agree
     It's for the best you didn't listen2012, Jeff Bhasker, Nate Ruess, Andrew Dost, Jack Antonoff, “Some Nights”, in Some Nights), performed by fun.

   Synonyms:

   ring up