Word.ws English Dictionary

muster up

muster up verb: look within oneself to summon a particular positive quality, such as strength, energy or courage.

Verb

muster up (third-person singular simple present musters up, present participle mustering up, simple past and past participle mustered up)

  1. Look within oneself to summon a particular positive quality, such as strength, energy or courage.
    • I mustered up all my remaining willpower.
    • Nobody save myself so much as turned to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought upon our globe.1846, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “P.'s Correspondence”, in Mosses from an Old Manse

Forms of muster up

third-person singular presentmusters up
present participlemustering up
past participlemustered up
pastmustered up

Questions about muster up

What does muster up mean?
Muster up means look within oneself to summon a particular positive quality, such as strength, energy or courage.
What part of speech is muster up?
Muster up is a verb.
What is the past tense of muster up?
The past tense of muster up is mustered up.

Words near muster up in the dictionary

  1. muster drill
  2. muster in
  3. muster out
  4. muster roll
  5. muster rolls
  6. muster up
  7. muster-book
  8. muster-books
  9. musterable
  10. musterbation
  11. musterdevillers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: muster 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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