Word.ws English Dictionary

pick up the tab

pick up the tab verb: to accept a bill and pay it, especially at a bar or restaurant.

Verb

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

  1. (US, idiomatic, intransitive) To accept a bill and pay it, especially at a bar or restaurant.
    • When the bill came to just 33,000 forints, I did something very out of character: I picked up the tab. It blew the budget for the day, but felt great.2014 January 30, Seth Kugel, “Wintertime Bargains in Budapest”, in The New York Times
    • Meanwhile, the taxpayer picked up the tab for over 50% of track and train costs at Northern, Merseyrail and the Transport for Wales rail operation.2020 March 25, Philip Haigh, “Analysis: Where the money comes from... and where it goes”, in Rail, page 34

Forms of pick up the tab

third-person singular presentpicks up the tab
present participlepicking up the tab
past participlepicked up the tab
pastpicked up the tab

Questions about pick up the tab

What does pick up the tab mean?
Pick up the tab means to accept a bill and pay it, especially at a bar or restaurant.
What part of speech is pick up the tab?
Pick up the tab is a verb.
What is the past tense of pick up the tab?
The past tense of pick up the tab is picked up the tab.

Words near pick up the tab in the dictionary

  1. pick up the mantle
  2. pick up the pace
  3. pick up the phone
  4. pick up the pieces
  5. pick up the slack
  6. pick up the tab
  7. pick up the threads
  8. pick up the threads of
  9. pick up truck
  10. pick up trucks
  11. pick up what someone is laying down

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pick up the tab (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:

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

Cite this entry: “pick up the tab.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pick_up_the_tab. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.