Word.ws English Dictionary

calling up

calling up is the present participle and gerund of call up.

Meaning of 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
  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
    Synonyms:
    ring up

Questions about calling up

What is calling up the present participle and gerund of?
Calling up is the present participle and gerund of call up.

Words near calling up in the dictionary

  1. calling to mind
  2. calling to order
  3. calling to task
  4. calling to the bar
  5. calling together
  6. calling up
  7. calling upon
  8. calling-card
  9. calling-cards
  10. Callingham
  11. callingly

Source and license

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