Word.ws English Dictionary

sit up and take notice

sit up and take notice verb: to start to pay attention suddenly.

Verb

sit up and take notice (third-person singular simple present sits up and takes notice, present participle sitting up and taking notice, simple past sat up and took notice, past participle sat up and taken notice)

  1. To start to pay attention suddenly.
    • But when we streaked through Doncaster at all but a mile-a-minute, with a miraculously clear road, in no more than 37 min. 18 sec. from the York start, I began to sit up and take notice.1949 November and December, Cecil J. Allen, “British Locomotive Practice and Performance”, in Railway Magazine, page 365

Synonyms of sit up and take notice

Forms of sit up and take notice

third-person singular presentsits up and takes notice
present participlesitting up and taking notice
pastsat up and took notice
past participlesat up and taken notice

Questions about sit up and take notice

What does sit up and take notice mean?
Sit up and take notice means to start to pay attention suddenly.
What part of speech is sit up and take notice?
Sit up and take notice is a verb.
What is the past tense of sit up and take notice?
The past tense of sit up and take notice is sat up and took notice.

Words near sit up and take notice in the dictionary

  1. sit there like a plum
  2. sit through
  3. sit tight
  4. sit under
  5. sit up
  6. sit up and take notice
  7. sit up with
  8. sit upon
  9. sit upons
  10. sit ups
  11. sit well

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sit up and take notice (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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