Word.ws English Dictionary

roughen up

roughen up verb: to make something rough or rougher.

Verb

roughen up (third-person singular simple present roughens up, present participle roughening up, simple past and past participle roughened up)

  1. (idiomatic, transitive) to make something rough or rougher

Forms of roughen up

third-person singular presentroughens up
present participleroughening up
past participleroughened up
pastroughened up

Questions about roughen up

What does roughen up mean?
Roughen up means to make something rough or rougher.
What part of speech is roughen up?
Roughen up is a verb.
What is the past tense of roughen up?
The past tense of roughen up is roughened up.

Words near roughen up in the dictionary

  1. roughed it
  2. roughed out
  3. roughed up
  4. roughed up the bullpen
  5. roughen
  6. roughen up
  7. roughened
  8. roughened up
  9. roughener
  10. rougheners
  11. roughening

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: roughen 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-roughen up.ogg.

Cite this entry: “roughen up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/roughen_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.