cranked up
cranked up is the simple past and past participle of crank up.
Meaning of crank up
Verb
crank up (third-person singular simple present cranks up, present participle cranking up, simple past and past participle cranked up)
- To start something mechanical, an act that often used to involve cranking.
- Let's crank up the old motorcycle and take it for a spin.
- To muster up the mental energy to do something.
- I kept thinking: this has nothing to do with my interests, with what I believe is a desirable subject for literature. I was doing it as a performance. I kept cranking myself up to perform, to meet the demands of the genre. I know this sounds terribly inartistic.1976 August 14, John Mitzel, Richard Hall, “The Whodunit Writer: Why He Dun It”, in Gay Community News, volume 4, number 7, page 7
- To prepare (something).
- To increase, as the volume, power or energy of something.
- He cranked up the volume to 11.
- To describe in praiseworthy terms; to promote.
- Was the great machine ever what it was cranked up to be?2003, Chris Jenks, Transgression
- To inject heroin.
Adjective
cranked up (comparative more cranked up, superlative most cranked up)
- Agitated; worked up.
- Now, I mean this turkey was cranked up good. He had been gobbling at the slightest sound of my hen calls earlier.1984, Ken Warner, Gun Digest, 1985, page 16
- She thought I'd had too much to drink, which, of course, I had. But now I felt cranked up and wide awake.2009, Nellis Boyer, Hancock House, page 63
Forms of cranked up
| comparative | more cranked up |
|---|---|
| superlative | most cranked up |
Questions about cranked up
- What does cranked up mean?
- Cranked up means agitated; worked up.
- What is cranked up the simple past and past participle of?
- Cranked up is the simple past and past participle of crank up.
- What part of speech is cranked up?
- Cranked up is an adjective.
Words near cranked up in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cranked up (page history and authors); crank 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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-cranked up.wav.
Cite this entry: “cranked up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cranked_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
