Word.ws English Dictionary

cook up

cook up verb: to prepare (food or chemical substances) by cooking or heating.

Verb

cook up (third-person singular simple present cooks up, present participle cooking up, simple past and past participle cooked up)

  1. (transitive) To prepare (food or chemical substances) by cooking or heating.
    • Let me cook up some eggs and bacon before you go.
    • To cook up a batch of biodiesel, scientists stir together methanol and vegetable fat.
  2. (figuratively, transitive) To manufacture; to invent (something, often a deceit or falsehood); to counterfeit (something).
    • The financiers cooked up an instrument called a collateralized debt obligation.
    • He really cooked up a good one this time, something about an airline disaster.
  3. (slang) To prepare (heroin, opium, crack, or meth) by heating or otherwise manufacturing.
  4. (slang) To manufacture a significant amount of illegal drugs (LSD, methamphetamine, etc.).
  5. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see cook, up.

Forms of cook up

third-person singular presentcooks up
present participlecooking up
past participlecooked up
pastcooked up

Words formed from cook up

Questions about cook up

What does cook up mean?
Cook up means to prepare (food or chemical substances) by cooking or heating.
What part of speech is cook up?
Cook up is a verb.
What is the past tense of cook up?
The past tense of cook up is cooked up.

Words near cook up in the dictionary

  1. Cook Strait
  2. cook tent
  3. cook tents
  4. cook the books
  5. cook through
  6. cook up
  7. cook up a storm
  8. Cook's Green
  9. Cook's Harbour
  10. cook's knife
  11. Cook's petrel

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cook 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-cook up.ogg.

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