Word.ws English Dictionary

rough up

rough up verb: to manhandle or beat up.

Verb

rough up (third-person singular simple present roughs up, present participle roughing up, simple past and past participle roughed up)

  1. To manhandle or beat up.
    • The gangsters roughed him up a little.
  2. To make rough, to roughen (especially doing so to wood while raising the grain).
  3. (historical) To rub the loam that covers the brick wall of a mould to make it adhere firmly.

Forms of rough up

third-person singular presentroughs up
present participleroughing up
past participleroughed up
pastroughed up

Words formed from rough up

Questions about rough up

What does rough up mean?
Rough up means to manhandle or beat up.
What part of speech is rough up?
Rough up is a verb.
What is the past tense of rough up?
The past tense of rough up is roughed up.

Words near rough up in the dictionary

  1. rough strings
  2. rough stuff
  3. rough trade
  4. rough trot
  5. rough trots
  6. rough up
  7. rough up the bullpen
  8. rough vacuum
  9. rough vacuums
  10. Rough Wooing
  11. rough-and-ready

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rough 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-rough up.wav.

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