Word.ws English Dictionary

cocking up

cocking up is the present participle and gerund of cock up.

Meaning of cock up

Verb

cock up (third-person singular simple present cocks up, present participle cocking up, simple past and past participle cocked up)

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, ambitransitive, mildly, slang) To ruin (something) unintentionally; to fuck up, mess up, or screw up.
    • It was cocking her up with gimcrack notions about ladies till she'd be ashamed to look at her own hands after she had done a day's work with them.1876 May – 1877 July, Anthony Trollope, “‘Wonderful Bird!’”, in The American Senator […], volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1877, →OCLC, page 282

Questions about cocking up

What is cocking up the present participle and gerund of?
Cocking up is the present participle and gerund of cock up.

Words near cocking up in the dictionary

  1. cocking of a snook
  2. cocking of snooks
  3. cocking off
  4. cocking on
  5. cocking one's toes
  6. cocking up
  7. cockings
  8. Cockins
  9. cockish
  10. cockknocker
  11. cockknockers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cocking up (page history and authors); cock 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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