Word.ws English Dictionary

sitting up and taking notice

sitting up and taking notice is the present participle and gerund of sit up and take notice.

Meaning of sit up and take notice

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

Questions about sitting up and taking notice

What is sitting up and taking notice the present participle and gerund of?
Sitting up and taking notice is the present participle and gerund of sit up and take notice.

Words near sitting up and taking notice in the dictionary

  1. sitting tight
  2. sitting toilet
  3. sitting toilets
  4. sitting under
  5. sitting up
  6. sitting up and taking notice
  7. sitting up with
  8. sitting upon
  9. sitting volleyball
  10. sitting with
  11. sitting-out area

Source and license

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