Word.ws English Dictionary

rock up

rock up verb: to turn up at a place or function spontaneously or unexpectedly, without notice or prior warning.

Verb (1)

rock up (third-person singular simple present rocks up, present participle rocking up, simple past and past participle rocked up)

  1. (informal) To turn up at a place or function spontaneously or unexpectedly, without notice or prior warning.
    • I'm sure the Brunel-designed stone-built structure would have had a hatstand for his trademark stovepipe. I can picture him rocking up there of a morning and lobbing it nonchalantly onto the hatstand.2021 December 29, Stephen Roberts, “Stories and facts behind railway plaques: Chippenham (1841)”, in RAIL, number 947, page 57
    Synonyms:
    show up

Verb (2)

rock up (third-person singular simple present rocks up, present participle rocking up, simple past and past participle rocked up)

  1. To work one's way vertically up a chimney or cleft using a rocking movement.
  2. (slang) To turn powder cocaine into crack cocaine by cooking.

Synonyms of rock up

Forms of rock up

third-person singular presentrocks up
present participlerocking up
past participlerocked up
pastrocked up

Origin of rock up

From rock + up.

From rock (“stone”) + up.

Questions about rock up

What does rock up mean?
Rock up means to turn up at a place or function spontaneously or unexpectedly, without notice or prior warning.
What part of speech is rock up?
Rock up is a verb.
What is the past tense of rock up?
The past tense of rock up is rocked up.

Words near rock up in the dictionary

  1. rock the house
  2. rock thrush
  3. rock thrushes
  4. rock tripe
  5. rock tripes
  6. rock up
  7. Rock Valley
  8. rock varnish
  9. rock varnishes
  10. rock wallabies
  11. rock wallaby

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rock 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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