Word.ws English Dictionary

racking up

racking up is the present participle and gerund of rack up.

Meaning of rack up

Verb

rack up (third-person singular simple present racks up, present participle racking up, simple past and past participle racked up)

  1. (ambitransitive) To arrange in a rack.
    • At the start of the game, the referee racks up the red balls.
  2. (idiomatic) To gain (points etc.; in a game or sport), to accumulate.
    • Chelsea racked up another 3 points at home to Bolton.
  3. (idiomatic) To acquire, to gather together.
    • By the age of 18, he had already racked up thousands of dollars in debt.
  4. (idiomatic) To defeat severely, to thrash.
  5. To collect one's chips and cash out.
  6. To attribute, chalk up.
    • A number of times I heard Bruce say, in passing, "I just don't see why everyone has to be labeled. I just don't think words like homosexual — or gay — do anything for anybody." And I would hold my counsel and rack it up to age.1986, Samuel R. Delany, Joseph Beam, “The Possibility of Possibilities”, in Joseph Beam, editor, In The Life: A Black Gay Anthology, page 204

Questions about racking up

What is racking up the present participle and gerund of?
Racking up is the present participle and gerund of rack up.

Words near racking up in the dictionary

  1. racking bends
  2. racking in
  3. racking off
  4. racking one's brain
  5. racking one's brains
  6. racking up
  7. rackingly
  8. rackings
  9. rackle
  10. rackled
  11. rackles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: racking up (page history and authors); rack 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: “racking up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/racking_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.