Word.ws English Dictionary

rug up

rug up verb: to put a rug on a horse.

Verb

rug up (third-person singular simple present rugs up, present participle rugging up, simple past and past participle rugged up)

  1. (transitive) To put a rug on a horse
    • The mare was naturally very weak and almost in a state of collapse, so we gave her half a pint of neat whisky, rugged her up, and rubbed her all over with embrocation.1913, VM/SAC, Veterinary Medicine & Small Animal Clinician Volume 8, page 677
  2. (Australia, informal, intransitive) To put on layers of warm clothes; to wrap up
    • To us, a rainy day may mean that we have to rug up and stay inside out of the elements, but the coming of a storm or the rising swell will find a mulloway that lives and feeds along the beaches, waiting around a river entrance for the mullet...2005, Gary Brown, Beach and Rock Fishing

Forms of rug up

third-person singular presentrugs up
present participlerugging up
past participlerugged up
pastrugged up

Questions about rug up

What does rug up mean?
Rug up means to put a rug on a horse.
What part of speech is rug up?
Rug up is a verb.
What is the past tense of rug up?
The past tense of rug up is rugged up.

Words near rug up in the dictionary

  1. rug ranking
  2. rug rat
  3. rug rats
  4. rug rider
  5. rug riders
  6. rug up
  7. rug-cutter
  8. rug-cutters
  9. rug-cutting
  10. rug-headed
  11. rug-muncher

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rug 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: en-au-rug up.ogg.

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