Word.ws English Dictionary

cocks up

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

What is cocks up the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Cocks up is the third-person singular simple present indicative of cock up.

Words near cocks up in the dictionary

  1. cocks of the roost
  2. cocks of the walk
  3. cocks off
  4. cocks on
  5. cocks one's toes
  6. cocks up
  7. cocks-of-the-rock
  8. cocksack
  9. cocksacks
  10. cockscomb
  11. cockscombed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cocks 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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