Word.ws English Dictionary

fell upon

fell upon is the simple past of fall upon.

Meaning of fall upon

Verb

fall upon (third-person singular simple present falls upon, present participle falling upon, simple past fell upon, past participle fallen upon)

  1. To experience; to suffer.
    • With the rise of the Internet, some media fell upon hard times.
  2. To occur at some particular point in time.
    • It fell upon the day of full moon of the fourth month, the second year, in the era of Established Calm (AD 168), that Emperor Ling went in state to the Hall of Virtue.1925, Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor, chapter 1, in Romance of the Three Kingdoms
  3. To set upon; to attack suddenly; to invade.
    • If the Duke, with the other dukes, come not to composition with the king of Hungary, why then all the dukes fall upon the king.c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
  4. To happen upon, find.
    • If we dig deeply into why it was so important for mainstream USA (and the rest that followed) to smear Jackson, we may fall upon the same reasons why more attention has been paid to Black women making anti-Semitic remarks than white women.1985 February 2, Malkah Barrsey Feldman, “Blacks & Jews: Vulnerability & Values”, in Gay Community News, volume 12, number 28, page 14

Questions about fell upon

What is fell upon the simple past of?
Fell upon is the simple past of fall upon.

Words near fell upon in the dictionary

  1. fell to pieces
  2. fell to the ground
  3. fell together
  4. fell under
  5. fell up
  6. fell upon
  7. fell victim
  8. fell-field
  9. fell-fields
  10. fell-maker
  11. fell-makers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fell upon (page history and authors); fall upon (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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