Word.ws English Dictionary

ran up

ran up is the simple past of run up.

Meaning of run up

Verb

run up (third-person singular simple present runs up, present participle running up, simple past ran up, past participle run up)

  1. To run (towards someone or something); to hasten to a destination.
    • As I was walking along the road, a man suddenly ran up to me.
  2. To approach (an event or point in time).
    • We are putting on lots of special attractions as we run up to Christmas.
  3. (transitive) To take to a destination or before an authority.
    • […] and I took him along and ran him up to police headquarters.1924, Michigan. Supreme Court, Michigan Reports, volume 226, page 46
  4. (dated) To erect hastily, as a building.
    • we wait until the palace is half-way up, and then we pay some tasty architect to run us up an ornamental mud hovel, right against it1840 February, Edgar Allan Poe, “Peter Pendulum, the Business Man”, in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, volume 6, number 2, page 87
  5. (idiomatic, transitive) To make something, usually an item of clothing, very quickly.
    • I'll run you up a skirt for tomorrow evening.
  6. (idiomatic, transitive) To bring (a flag) to the top of its flag pole.
    • Stand quietly while the honor guard runs the flag up.

See all 14 meanings of run up

Questions about ran up

What is ran up the simple past of?
Ran up is the simple past of run up.

Words near ran up in the dictionary

  1. ran to earth
  2. ran to ground
  3. ran to the ground
  4. ran to the hills
  5. ran to waste
  6. ran up
  7. ran up against
  8. ran up in
  9. ran up in it
  10. ran up on
  11. ran wild

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ran up (page history and authors); run 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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Cite this entry: “ran up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ran_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.