Word.ws English Dictionary

ratcheting up

ratcheting up is the present participle and gerund of ratchet up.

Meaning of ratchet up

Verb

ratchet up (third-person singular simple present ratchets up, present participle ratcheting up, simple past and past participle ratcheted up)

  1. (ambitransitive) To increase; especially, to increase by degrees in a way that only gets worse, never experiencing any reprieves.
    • Near-synonyms: dial up, hike up
    Synonyms:
    dial up, hike up

Questions about ratcheting up

What is ratcheting up the present participle and gerund of?
Ratcheting up is the present participle and gerund of ratchet up.

Words near ratcheting up in the dictionary

  1. ratcheted
  2. ratcheted up
  3. ratcheting
  4. ratcheting toadlet
  5. ratcheting toadlets
  6. ratcheting up
  7. ratchetings
  8. ratchetlike
  9. ratchetness
  10. ratchets
  11. ratchets up

Source and license

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