Word.ws English Dictionary

loose up

loose up is the nonstandard form of loosen up.

Meaning of loosen up

Verb

loosen up (third-person singular simple present loosens up, present participle loosening up, simple past and past participle loosened up)

  1. (intransitive) To become loose; to loosen; to relax (a muscle, etc.).
  2. (colloquial) To relax; to act less seriously.
    • Michael in turn benefits from Tom. He loosens up a bit, stops talking so much like one of the bad novels he used to read, and learns to give his intellect a rest once in a while in deference to the emotions.1983 December 31, Kenneth Hale-Wehmann, “The Business of Sex and Affection”, in Gay Community News, volume 11, number 24, page 8

Forms of loose up

third-person singular presentlooses up
present participleloosing up
past participleloosed up
pastloosed up

Questions about loose up

What is loose up the nonstandard form of?
Loose up is the nonstandard form of loosen up.

Words near loose up in the dictionary

  1. loose smut
  2. loose smuts
  3. loose socks
  4. loose tongue
  5. loose tongues
  6. loose up
  7. loose woman
  8. loose women
  9. loose-box
  10. loose-boxes
  11. loose-coupled

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: loose up (page history and authors); loosen 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: “loose up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/loose_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.