Word.ws English Dictionary

dragged up

dragged up is the simple past and past participle of drag up.

Meaning of drag up

Verb

drag up (third-person singular simple present drags up, present participle dragging up, simple past and past participle dragged up)

  1. To remind people of (something, usually unpleasant, from the past).
    • I don't know why John had to drag up the incident of the car accident. It was really embarrassing.
  2. (figuratively, transitive) To educate reluctant pupils.
    • "I don't want to spoil any comparison you are going to make," said Jim, "but I was at Winchester and New College." ¶ "That will do," said Mackenzie. "I was dragged up at the workhouse school till I was twelve.[…]"1909 September 9, Archibald Marshall [pseudonym; Arthur Hammond Marshall], chapter II, in The Squire’s Daughter, London: Methuen & Co. […], →OCLC
  3. (UK, figuratively, transitive) To raise a child with insufficient discipline or instillment of social etiquette.
    • It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.1852, Charles Dickens, Bleak House
  4. Of a man: to dress in women's clothing for entertainment.
  5. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see drag, up.

Questions about dragged up

What is dragged up the simple past and past participle of?
Dragged up is the simple past and past participle of drag up.

Words near dragged up in the dictionary

  1. dragged one's feet
  2. dragged out
  3. dragged the chain
  4. dragged through the garden
  5. dragged through the mud
  6. dragged up
  7. dragger
  8. dragger-down
  9. draggers
  10. draggers-down
  11. dragges

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dragged up (page history and authors); drag 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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Cite this entry: “dragged up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dragged_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.