Word.ws English Dictionary

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)

  1. 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.
  2. (idiomatic, reflexive) 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
  3. (idiomatic, slang) To prepare (something).
  4. (idiomatic) To increase, as the volume, power or energy of something.
    • He cranked up the volume to 11.
  5. To describe in praiseworthy terms; to promote.
    • Was the great machine ever what it was cranked up to be?2003, Chris Jenks, Transgression
  6. (intransitive, slang) To inject heroin.

Adjective

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

  1. 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

comparativemore cranked up
superlativemost 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

  1. cranked one out
  2. cranked one's hog
  3. cranked out
  4. cranked the handle
  5. cranked the hog
  6. cranked up
  7. cranker
  8. crankers
  9. crankery
  10. crankest
  11. crankhandle

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.

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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.