glow-up
glow-up noun: a major and impressive transformation in appearance, talent, power, etc.
Noun
glow-up (plural glow-ups)
- A major and impressive transformation in appearance, talent, power, etc.
- I recognised this in college, before he got his teeth done, before he got the tan and the #confidence and the style, back when he was obsessed with Eminem and had terrible bleached hair. I bagged him as my bestie nice and early, before his uber glow-up.2017, Vicky Pattison, My Sister's Wedding, →ISBN
- Let us now marvel at a lady who achieved one of the most impressive glow ups in the thousand-plus-years history of the Byzantine Empire: Empress Theodora.2018, Hannah Jewell, She Caused a Riot: 100 Unknown Women Who Built Cities, Sparked Revolutions, and Massively Crushed It, unnumbered page
- Antonyms:
- glow-down
Antonyms of glow-up
Forms of glow-up
| plural | glow-ups |
|---|---|
| alternative form | glowup |
| alternative form | glow up |
Origin of glow-up
From glow + up, modelled after such deverbals as blow-up; diachronically, probably not a deverbal from the verb glow up, which was back-formed from the noun.
Questions about glow-up
- What does glow-up mean?
- Glow-up means a major and impressive transformation in appearance, talent, power, etc.
- What part of speech is glow-up?
- Glow-up is a noun.
- What is the plural of glow-up?
- The plural of glow-up is glow-ups.
Words near glow-up in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: glow-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-glow-up.wav.
Cite this entry: “glow-up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/glow-up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.