Word.ws English Dictionary

push up against

push up against verb: to generate pressure on (someone or something); to challenge.

Verb

push up against (third-person singular simple present pushes up against, present participle pushing up against, simple past and past participle pushed up against)

  1. (transitive) To generate pressure on (someone or something); to challenge.
    • Beyond delivering services, Bobby brought his revolutionary nationalist theory to the job and used the opportunity to push up against the ideological bias in the government program.2016 October 25, Joshua Bloom, Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Univ of California Press, →ISBN, page 36
    • If there’s a bar for the features and performance that make a flagship phone, well, flagshippy, then the midrange Samsung Galaxy A54 5G pushes right up against it. When this $449 device is sitting on a table next to the $999 Galaxy S23 Plus, I can barely tell the two apart until I’m close enough to...2023 April 13, Allison Johnson, “Samsung Galaxy A54 5G review: a little bit flagship, but mostly midrange”, in The Verge
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see push, up against.

Forms of push up against

third-person singular presentpushes up against
present participlepushing up against
past participlepushed up against
pastpushed up against

Questions about push up against

What does push up against mean?
Push up against means to generate pressure on (someone or something); to challenge.
What part of speech is push up against?
Push up against is a verb.
What is the past tense of push up against?
The past tense of push up against is pushed up against.

Words near push up against in the dictionary

  1. push time
  2. push times
  3. push together
  4. push under
  5. push up
  6. push up against
  7. push up daisies
  8. push up on
  9. push up the daisies
  10. push water uphill
  11. push wood

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: push up against (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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