Word.ws English Dictionary

dust up

dust up verb: to cover with dust.

Verb

dust up (third-person singular simple present dusts up, present participle dusting up, simple past and past participle dusted up)

  1. (transitive) To cover with dust.
  2. (slang, transitive) To attack (a person) physically; to beat up.
    • I promptly put my machine behind him and was about to dust him up a bit when another Fokker came to my help and got in first. He dived on the Caudron, who bolted at once. The Nieuport saw him and came to help his comrade in distress.2009, Johannes Werner, Knight of Germany: Oswald Boelcke German Ace, page 194

Forms of dust up

third-person singular presentdusts up
present participledusting up
past participledusted up
pastdusted up

Questions about dust up

What does dust up mean?
Dust up means to cover with dust.
What part of speech is dust up?
Dust up is a verb.
What is the past tense of dust up?
The past tense of dust up is dusted up.

Words near dust up in the dictionary

  1. dust someone's jacket
  2. dust storm
  3. dust storms
  4. dust trap
  5. dust traps
  6. dust up
  7. dust-bin
  8. dust-bins
  9. dust-brand
  10. dust-collector
  11. dust-collectors

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dust 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-dustup.wav.

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