Word.ws English Dictionary

calls up

calls up is the third-person singular simple present indicative 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 calls up

What is calls up the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Calls up is the third-person singular simple present indicative of call up.

Words near calls up in the dictionary

  1. calls to order
  2. calls to prayer
  3. calls to task
  4. calls to the bar
  5. calls together
  6. calls up
  7. calls upon
  8. calls-to-arms
  9. callset
  10. callsets
  11. callsign

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: calls 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “calls up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/calls_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.