Word.ws English Dictionary

dream up

dream up verb: to have an imaginative, unusual or foolish idea, to invent something unreal.

Verb

dream up (third-person singular simple present dreams up, present participle dreaming up, simple past and past participle dreamed up or dreamt up)

  1. To have an imaginative, unusual or foolish idea, to invent something unreal.
    • It's as if he were giving a performance of some character he's dreamed up, and his pale eyes wander in search of effect even in his apparently wildest moments.1996, Steven H. Gale, Encyclopedia of British Humorists, →ISBN
    • I am not arguing that I can dream up any reality I like.1999, John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill, editors, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, →ISBN

Forms of dream up

third-person singular presentdreams up
present participledreaming up
past participledreamed up
pastdreamed up
past participledreamt up
pastdreamt up

Questions about dream up

What does dream up mean?
Dream up means to have an imaginative, unusual or foolish idea, to invent something unreal.
What part of speech is dream up?
Dream up is a verb.
What is the past tense of dream up?
The past tense of dream up is dreamed up.

Words near dream up in the dictionary

  1. dream team
  2. dream teams
  3. Dream Time
  4. dream trance
  5. dream true
  6. dream up
  7. dream world
  8. dream worlds
  9. dream yoga
  10. dream'd
  11. dream-job

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dream 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)-Vealhurl-dream up.wav.

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