Word.ws English Dictionary

pick it up

pick it up verb: to hurry up, pick up the pace.

Verb

pick it up (third-person singular simple present picks it up, present participle picking it up, simple past and past participle picked it up)

  1. To hurry up, pick up the pace.

Forms of pick it up

third-person singular presentpicks it up
present participlepicking it up
past participlepicked it up
pastpicked it up

Origin of pick it up

Its exact orignal is unknown, but possibly comes from the practice of scatting and toasting in Jamaican ska music. The first recorded use of the term comes from The Employees's 1980 song "Pick it Up". The related Jamaican phrase "You pick him up, you lick him dung" is recorded as early as 1966 in Prince Buster's song "Hard Man Fe Dead".

Questions about pick it up

What does pick it up mean?
Pick it up means to hurry up, pick up the pace.
What part of speech is pick it up?
Pick it up is a verb.
What is the past tense of pick it up?
The past tense of pick it up is picked it up.

Words near pick it up in the dictionary

  1. pick gun
  2. pick guns
  3. pick hammer
  4. pick hammers
  5. pick holes
  6. pick it up
  7. pick me
  8. pick mes
  9. pick oakum
  10. pick of the crop
  11. pick of the litter

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pick it 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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