Word.ws English Dictionary

hackle up

hackle up verb: to have one's hackles raised; to become annoyed or frightened.

Verb

hackle up (third-person singular simple present hackles up, present participle hackling up, simple past and past participle hackled up)

  1. (informal, intransitive) To have one's hackles raised; to become annoyed or frightened.

Forms of hackle up

third-person singular presenthackles up
present participlehackling up
past participlehackled up
pasthackled up

Questions about hackle up

What does hackle up mean?
Hackle up means to have one's hackles raised; to become annoyed or frightened.
What part of speech is hackle up?
Hackle up is a verb.
What is the past tense of hackle up?
The past tense of hackle up is hackled up.

Words near hackle up in the dictionary

  1. Hackitt
  2. Hackl
  3. hacklab
  4. hacklabs
  5. hackle
  6. hackle up
  7. hackleback
  8. hackled
  9. hackled up
  10. Hackleman
  11. Hacklemans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hackle 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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Cite this entry: “hackle up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hackle_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.