Word.ws English Dictionary

phone up

phone up verb: to phone; to contact by telephone.

Verb

phone up (third-person singular simple present phones up, present participle phoning up, simple past and past participle phoned up)

  1. (ambitransitive) To phone; to contact by telephone.
    • ‘I don’t believe it!’ cried Maxine, who had only phoned up in order to relieve her own boredom and have a good moan about Serena.1994, Jill Mansell, chapter 14, in Sheer Mischief, London: Headline, published 2001, →ISBN, page 118
    Synonyms:
    call, give a ring, phone, ring
  2. (transitive) To order by telephone.
    • "If we can get his bolster-cover round his arms and then 'phone up a stomach-pump, we'll give the old dear the supper of his life."1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

Synonyms of phone up

Forms of phone up

third-person singular presentphones up
present participlephoning up
past participlephoned up
pastphoned up

Questions about phone up

What does phone up mean?
Phone up means to phone; to contact by telephone.
What part of speech is phone up?
Phone up is a verb.
What is the past tense of phone up?
The past tense of phone up is phoned up.

Words near phone up in the dictionary

  1. phone survey
  2. phone surveys
  3. phone tag
  4. phone tree
  5. phone trees
  6. phone up
  7. phone zombie
  8. phone zombies
  9. phone-bank
  10. phone-banked
  11. phone-banking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phone 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:

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