Word.ws English Dictionary

eye up

eye up verb: to examine (something or someone) closely (often, something or someone coveted).

Verb

eye up (third-person singular simple present eyes up, present participle eyeing up or eying up, simple past and past participle eyed up)

  1. (colloquial, idiomatic, transitive) To examine (something or someone) closely (often, something or someone coveted).
    • Near-synonyms: give someone the eye, take a look (intransitive)
    • That creep in the corner was eyeing me up.
  2. (colloquial, idiomatic) To examine casually by eye, with little or no measuring or testing.
    • Hey, while you're there, take a look at their furnace. You don't have to inspect it — just eye it up and tell me whether it's decrepit or not.
    Synonyms:
    eyeball

Synonyms of eye up

Forms of eye up

third-person singular presenteyes up
present participleeyeing up
present participleeying up
past participleeyed up
pasteyed up

Questions about eye up

What does eye up mean?
Eye up means to examine (something or someone) closely (often, something or someone coveted).
What part of speech is eye up?
Eye up is a verb.
What is the past tense of eye up?
The past tense of eye up is eyed up.

Words near eye up in the dictionary

  1. eye test
  2. eye tests
  3. eye to eye
  4. eye tooth
  5. eye tracking
  6. eye up
  7. eye washer
  8. Eye Water
  9. eye witness
  10. eye witnesses
  11. Eye, Moreton and Ashton

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: eye 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: en-au-eye up.ogg.

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