Word.ws English Dictionary

cheek up to

cheek up to verb: to act disrespectfully toward (someone).

Verb

cheek up to (third-person singular simple present cheeks up to, present participle cheeking up to, simple past and past participle cheeked up to)

  1. (informal, transitive) To act disrespectfully toward (someone).
    • She thought of her sister Elizabeth with her eight, and remembered that one who cheeked up to the teachers, so pretty and sulky and shabby, ...2001 November 17, Muriel Spark, All the Stories of Muriel Spark, New Directions Publishing, →ISBN, page 44
    • I suppose the nursing home was glad to get rid of him. He made passes at the youngest nurses and cheeked up to the older ones.2012 March 20, Muriel Spark, Reality and Dreams: A Novel, Open Road Media, →ISBN
    Synonyms:
    cheek up

Synonyms of cheek up to

Forms of cheek up to

third-person singular presentcheeks up to
present participlecheeking up to
past participlecheeked up to
pastcheeked up to

Origin of cheek up to

See cheek (“impudence, impertinence”).

Questions about cheek up to

What does cheek up to mean?
Cheek up to means to act disrespectfully toward (someone).
What part of speech is cheek up to?
Cheek up to is a verb.
What is the past tense of cheek up to?
The past tense of cheek up to is cheeked up to.

Words near cheek up to in the dictionary

  1. cheek teeth
  2. cheek to cheek
  3. cheek to jowl
  4. cheek tooth
  5. cheek up
  6. cheek up to
  7. cheek-bone
  8. cheek-bones
  9. cheek-by-jowl
  10. cheek-to-jowl
  11. cheekbone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cheek up to (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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