nut up

/nʌt ʌp/

nut up verb: to show courage and hide one's apprehension.

Verb (1)

nut up (third-person singular simple present nuts up, present participle nutting up, simple past and past participle nutted up)

(intransitive, slang) To show courage and hide one's apprehension.

Synonyms:

man up, endure, put up with, take lying down

nut up (third-person singular simple present nuts up, present participle nutting up, simple past and past participle nutted up)

(intransitive, slang) To lose one's temper, go nuts.
- And what if some shit went wrong? Pimp was known to get crazy over minor shit. I didn't know if I could trust him to pull off a job like this without nutting up in the middle of the mix.2006, Noire [pseudonym], Thug-A-Licious: An Urban Erotic Tale, New York, N.Y.: One World, Ballantine Books, →ISBN, page 103
Synonyms:

nut out

third-person singular present	nuts up
present participle	nutting up
past participle	nutted up
past	nutted up

From nut + up (influenced by expressions like "man up" or "shut up"; "nut" refers to testicles, symbolically implying being more manly).

From nut + up, apparently related to go nuts and do one's nut.

What does nut up mean?: Nut up means to show courage and hide one's apprehension.
What part of speech is nut up?: Nut up is a verb.
How do you pronounce nut up?: Nut up is pronounced /nʌt ʌp/.
What is the past tense of nut up?: The past tense of nut up is nutted up.

Adapted from Wiktionary: nut 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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-nut up.ogg.

Cite this entry: “nut up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nut_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.