Word.ws English Dictionary

cowboy up

cowboy up verb: to deal with hardship with toughness and without complaining; man up.

Verb

cowboy up (third-person singular simple present cowboys up, present participle cowboying up, simple past and past participle cowboyed up)

  1. To deal with hardship with toughness and without complaining; man up.
    • COWBOY UP!! Be a man, son. Walk it off, says the coach.2004, Mary Ann Van Osdell, Hands Pointed Up, →ISBN, page 61
    • “Cowboy up!”, your excuses are gettin thin!2012, Mel Leslie, A Cowboy's Journey Through My Eyes: A Book of Poems, →ISBN, page 11
  2. (idiomatic) To put on a more heterosexual manner, in order to fit in.

cowboy up meaning in Bengali

cowboy up in Bengali

সাহস সঞ্চয় করা

Examples of cowboy up in a sentence

  • Now they think we can't cowboy up, but we could show'em a thang or three.2014, Sam Welch, What's Your Problem, Cowboy?, →ISBN:
  • It's past time to cowboy up and do what's right, even if it means accepting the stigma involved in visibly and vocally standing up for good people like Paco and Lupe.2018 August 5, “Writers on the Range: To survive we need immigrants working the land”, in The Durango Herald:
  • Men in rural America are taught to "cowboy up" and not speak of depression.August 24, 2018, “A Suicide on the Farm”, in CNN:

Forms of cowboy up

third-person singular presentcowboys up
present participlecowboying up
past participlecowboyed up
pastcowboyed up

Questions about cowboy up

What does cowboy up mean?
Cowboy up means to deal with hardship with toughness and without complaining; man up.
What is cowboy up in Bengali?
Cowboy up in Bengali is সাহস সঞ্চয় করা. See Cowboy up meaning in Bengali.
How do you use cowboy up in a sentence?
Now they think we can't cowboy up, but we could show'em a thang or three.
What part of speech is cowboy up?
Cowboy up is a verb.
What is the past tense of cowboy up?
The past tense of cowboy up is cowboyed up.

Words near cowboy up in the dictionary

  1. cowboy steak
  2. cowboy steaks
  3. cowboy supper
  4. cowboy suppers
  5. cowboy tea
  6. cowboy up
  7. cowboy-hatted
  8. cowboyed
  9. cowboyed up
  10. cowboying
  11. cowboying up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cowboy up (page history and authors); cowboy up (Bengali Wiktionary) (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:

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

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