Word.ws English Dictionary

risen to the occasion

risen to the occasion is the past participle of rise to the occasion.

Meaning of rise to the occasion

Verb

rise to the occasion (third-person singular simple present rises to the occasion, present participle rising to the occasion, simple past rose to the occasion, past participle risen to the occasion)

  1. (idiomatic) To show resolve or effectiveness in dealing with a difficulty.
    • Gabriel, though one of the quietest and most gentle men on earth, rose to the occasion, with martial promptness and vigour. "That's my fist. . . . Now — the first man in the parish that I hear prophesying bad of our mistress, why" (here the fist was raised and let fall as Thor might have done with...1874, Thomas Hardy, chapter 15, in Far from the Madding Crowd
  2. (euphemistic, humorous, idiomatic) To achieve an erection of the penis.
    • To his comic fury and shame, the traveller's 'master part' fails to rise to the occasion, and the girl's innocence is preserved.2001, John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography

Questions about risen to the occasion

What is risen to the occasion the past participle of?
Risen to the occasion is the past participle of rise to the occasion.

Words near risen to the occasion in the dictionary

  1. risen from the ashes
  2. risen from the dead
  3. risen through the ranks
  4. risen to the bait
  5. risen to the challenge
  6. risen to the occasion
  7. risen to the purple
  8. risen up
  9. risen with the lark
  10. risen with the sun
  11. risendronate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: risen to the occasion (page history and authors); rise to the occasion (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: “risen to the occasion.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/risen_to_the_occasion. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.