Word.ws English Dictionary

set-up

set-up is the alternative form of setup.

Meaning of setup

Noun

setup (plural setups)

  1. Equipment designed for a particular purpose; an apparatus.
    • The laboratory included an elaborate setup for measuring the energy.
    Synonyms:
    apparatus, loadout
  2. The fashion in which something is organized or arranged.
    • The classroom setup was simple and efficient.
  3. A situation orchestrated to frame someone; a covert effort to place the blame on somebody.
    • Trust me, that was a setup!
    Synonyms:
    frameup, stitch-up
  4. An installer.
    • You still have to run the setup and select the display driver after restarting Windows. Installing Windows NT drivers was tedious (but we could back up system files), and OS/2 was tiresome; […]1995 August 28, InfoWorld, page 80
  5. (operations) The process or instance of arranging resources for performing a specific operation, as a run of a particular product.
    • A simple setup on the bottling line involves reloading bottles and labels; emptying, cleaning, and reloading the tanks; and a test run.
  6. The tendency of persistent wind to produce higher water levels at the downwind shore of a body of water and lower at the upwind shore.
    • There was a strong wind setup at the south end of the lake after a day of northerly gales.

See all 7 meanings of setup

Forms of set-up

Adjective
comparativemore set-up
superlativemost set-up
Noun
pluralset-ups

Origin of set-up

Deverbal from set up.

Questions about set-up

What is set-up the alternative form of?
Set-up is the alternative form of setup.

Words near set-up in the dictionary

  1. set-theoretically
  2. set-to
  3. set-top box
  4. set-top boxes
  5. set-tos
  6. set-up
  7. set-ups
  8. seta
  9. setaceo-serrate
  10. setaceous
  11. setaceous Hebrew character

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: set-up (page history and authors); setup (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-set-up.wav.

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