Word.ws English Dictionary

rear up

rear up verb: to rise up, especially an animal like a horse rising up on its rear legs.

Verb

rear up (third-person singular simple present rears up, present participle rearing up, simple past and past participle reared up)

  1. (intransitive) To rise up, especially an animal like a horse rising up on its rear legs.
    • She had a good idea of what was coming, and the moment York took the rein off the terret in order to shorten it, she took her opportunity, and reared up so suddenly, that York had his nose roughly hit, and his hat knocked off; […][1877], Anna Sewell, “A Strike for Liberty”, in Black Beauty: […], London: Jarrold and Sons, […], →OCLC, part II, page 106

Forms of rear up

third-person singular presentrears up
present participlerearing up
past participlereared up
pastreared up

Origin of rear up

From rear + up.

Questions about rear up

What does rear up mean?
Rear up means to rise up, especially an animal like a horse rising up on its rear legs.
What part of speech is rear up?
Rear up is a verb.
What is the past tense of rear up?
The past tense of rear up is reared up.

Words near rear up in the dictionary

  1. rear naked chokes
  2. rear one's head
  3. rear one's ugly head
  4. rear projection
  5. rear projections
  6. rear up
  7. rear view
  8. rear vision mirror
  9. rear vision mirrors
  10. rear wheel
  11. rear wheels

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rear 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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