Word.ws English Dictionary

selling up

selling up is the present participle and gerund of sell up.

Meaning of sell up

Verb

sell up (third-person singular simple present sells up, present participle selling up, simple past and past participle sold up)

  1. (intransitive) To sell one's business or other major asset (such as a home).
    Synonyms:
    sell out
  2. (UK, transitive) To sell all (of the assets of a company or person), in order to reduce its debts or gain liquid money.
    • […] he was never known to give away a shilling or to do a good action, but was of a pleasant, sly, laughing mood, and would cut his joke and drink his glass with a tenant and sell him up the next day […]1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 9, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    sell out
  3. (sales) To upsell.
    • Attracting consumers with a low-priced feature item and then pointing out weaknesses in order to sell up to a more expensive […]2001, Montrose S. Sommers, James G. Barnes, Fundamentals of marketing, page 438

Questions about selling up

What is selling up the present participle and gerund of?
Selling up is the present participle and gerund of sell up.

Words near selling up in the dictionary

  1. selling snow to Eskimos
  2. selling someone a bill of goods
  3. selling the dummy
  4. selling the family silver
  5. selling the pass
  6. selling up
  7. selling wolf tickets
  8. selling-plater
  9. selling-platers
  10. Sellinger
  11. Sellingers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: selling up (page history and authors); sell 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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Cite this entry: “selling up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/selling_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.