Word.ws English Dictionary

lick up

lick up verb: to consume something by first licking it from a surface.

Verb

lick up (third-person singular simple present licks up, present participle licking up, simple past and past participle licked up)

  1. (transitive) To consume something by first licking it from a surface.
    • There was likewise a homeless dog, with his tail between his legs, licking up the crumbs and gnawing the fragments of the feast1854, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Christmas Banquet

Forms of lick up

third-person singular presentlicks up
present participlelicking up
past participlelicked up
pastlicked up

Questions about lick up

What does lick up mean?
Lick up means to consume something by first licking it from a surface.
What part of speech is lick up?
Lick up is a verb.
What is the past tense of lick up?
The past tense of lick up is licked up.

Words near lick up in the dictionary

  1. lick spout
  2. lick spouts
  3. lick the birse
  4. lick the dust
  5. lick the pants off
  6. lick up
  7. lick-and-stick
  8. lick-box
  9. lick-boxes
  10. lick-dish
  11. lick-dishes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lick 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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