Word.ws English Dictionary

crack up

/ˈkɹæk ˈʌp/

crack up verb: to laugh heartily.

Verb

crack up (third-person singular simple present cracks up, present participle cracking up, simple past and past participle cracked up)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To laugh heartily.
    • It was hilarious. We were cracking up the whole time.
  2. (idiomatic, transitive) To cause to laugh heartily.
    • The joke about the nuns in the bath cracked me up.
    • The joy of “Ticket to Paradise” comes not from its predictable plotting or razor-thin screenplay; it’s from watching them together, from observing how the sparks still fly, and (when the former flames get drunk and let their guards down, or during the end-credit outtakes) watching them crack each...2022 October 21, Jason Bailey, “How George Clooney and Julia Roberts Quietly Became the Tracy-Hepburn of Our Time”, in The New York Times
  3. (intransitive, slang) To tease (someone) or tell jokes at the expense of (someone).
    • He's always cracking up at me about that.
  4. (dated, idiomatic, intransitive) To become insane; to suffer a mental breakdown.
    • She got through the war, but cracked up when her sister died.
    • All rather inhuman and undernourished, isn’t it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking up.1936 February, F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”, in Esquire
  5. (idiomatic) To break down or fall apart; to stop functioning; to shatter.
    • The university was really cracking up, losing faculty, students and donors, and it seemed like to go under.
    • My motorcycle cracked up before I arrived.
  6. (idiomatic, transitive) To separate a group.
    • I have to crack up that little clique.
  7. (US) To crash an aircraft or automobile.
    • From all directions they came to the rescue, one predominant fear gripping their hearts: Fire! Someone had cracked-up. It was for this they sped. The flames that so frequently burst from a crashed airplane became an instantaneous cauldron; many a pilot has lived through the crash to die in the fire...1930 December, Lawrence M. Guyer, “Chuck Luck: The Story of a Flying Dog”, in Boys' Life
    • When I reported this to Burwell by telephone, he called me a Chinese ace — in those days Chinese aces were pilots who cracked up their own airplanes […]1983, John Thorn, David Reuther, The Armchair Aviator, page 101
  8. (transitive) To remove the shell from nuts.
    • We can send you a hundred pounds a month of pecans to crack up.
  9. (transitive) To crack (petroleum). (to break down (a complex molecule), especially with the application of heat: to pyrolyse)
    • The refinery cracks up the heavier oils.
  10. (slang, transitive) To praise or applaud (something); to promote a positive view of (something).
    • She wasn't as impressive as Katie cracked her up.
  11. (dated, transitive) To insult, demean or harm the image of (something).
    • Those who have been cracking up the agricultural industry will hopefully reconsider their denigration of it.
  12. (informal, transitive, usually passive voice) To cry up; to extol.
    • This new computer system is not what it was cracked up to be.
    • No use, with a bloke like this, cracking up your own merits. Stick to the truth.1939 June, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter IX, in Coming Up for Air, London: Martin Secker & Warburg, published 1948 (April 1959 printing), →OCLC, part II, page 132
  13. (intransitive, slang) To smoke crack cocaine.
    • I need to crack up.

Adjective

crack up (comparative more crack up, superlative most crack up)

  1. (New Zealand, colloquial) Funny; hilarious
    • That joke was crack up.
    • "It was crack up!"2017 April 23, “McDonald's say 'neigh' to horses through the drive-thru”, in Stuff

crack up meaning in Malayalam

crack up in Malayalam

break down, have a breakdown, lose control
തകരുക, പൊട്ടിക്കരയുക, നിയന്ത്രണം വിടുക, ഭ്രാന്തുപിടിക്കുക, വികാരം നിയന്ത്രിക്കാൻ പറ്റാതെ വരുക, നിയന്ത്രണം വിട്ടുപോകുക

Examples of crack up in a sentence

  • In town people would stop and say to me, “Hey Becky, that cat story was crack up.”2020 April 20, “The curious case of a fictional spa in Westport”, in Newsroom:
  • One person said it was "crack up", while the woman who uploaded it said "I'm a do it again (sic)".2020 June 5, “Police looking into footage of woman twerking on Auckland Harbour Bridge”, in Newshub, archived from the original on 20 Sep...

Forms of crack up

Verb
third-person singular presentcracks up
present participlecracking up
past participlecracked up
pastcracked up
Adjective
comparativemore crack up
superlativemost crack up

Origin of crack up

Compare Japanese 笑う (warau, “laugh, smile”), suffixed from Japanese 割る (waru, “crack”).

Words formed from crack up

Questions about crack up

What does crack up mean?
Crack up means to laugh heartily.
What is crack up in Malayalam?
Crack up in Malayalam is തകരുക, പൊട്ടിക്കരയുക, നിയന്ത്രണം വിടുക. See Crack up meaning in Malayalam.
How do you use crack up in a sentence?
In town people would stop and say to me, “Hey Becky, that cat story was crack up.”
What part of speech is crack up?
Crack up can be a verb or an adjective.
How do you pronounce crack up?
Crack up is pronounced /ˈkɹæk ˈʌp/.
What is the past tense of crack up?
The past tense of crack up is cracked up.

Words near crack up in the dictionary

  1. crack the flags
  2. crack the whip
  3. crack through
  4. crack train
  5. crack trains
  6. crack up
  7. crack whore
  8. crack whores
  9. crack willow
  10. crack willows
  11. crack wise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crack up (page history and authors); crack up (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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-crack up.ogg.

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