Word.ws English Dictionary

shacked up

shacked up is the simple past and past participle of shack up.

Adjective

shacked up (not comparable)

  1. Sharing a small room or accommodation between many (often too many) people
  2. (idiomatic) (of a couple) Sharing a house, but not married.

Meaning of shack up

Verb

shack up (third-person singular simple present shacks up, present participle shacking up, simple past and past participle shacked up)

  1. (colloquial) To live together, especially of an unmarried couple.
    • The only thing I want to do after the war is marry some girl who's got more money than I have and shack up with lots more pretty girls.1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “The Soldier in White”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, page 173

Questions about shacked up

What does shacked up mean?
Shacked up means sharing a small room or accommodation between many (often too many) people.
What is shacked up the simple past and past participle of?
Shacked up is the simple past and past participle of shack up.
What part of speech is shacked up?
Shacked up is an adjective.

Words near shacked up in the dictionary

  1. shackbolt
  2. shackbolts
  3. shackdweller
  4. shackdwellers
  5. shacked
  6. shacked up
  7. Shackelford
  8. Shackelford County
  9. Shackelfords
  10. Shackerstone
  11. shacket

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shacked up (page history and authors); shack 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-shacked up.ogg.

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