Word.ws English Dictionary

spark up

spark up verb: to rekindle.

Verb

spark up (third-person singular simple present sparks up, present participle sparking up, simple past and past participle sparked up)

  1. (transitive) To rekindle.
  2. (transitive) To make more exotic or fun.
    Synonyms:
    sex up, spice up
  3. (intransitive) To light up; light a cigarette or start smoking a pipe, bong, etc.
  4. (slang, transitive) To light a cigarette etc. for (a person).
    • Spark me up, mate.
  5. (transitive) To initiate (a conversation, debate etc.).
    Synonyms:
    strike up
  6. (informal) To provide electrification.
    • Again, to go back to the history of British Railways, there were moves to introduce electrification more widely when the West Coast Main Line was sparked up in the 1960s, but this was rejected by dyed-in-the-wool old regional railway managers who did not like the hassle of putting up the wires.2021 April 7, Christian Wolmar, “Electrification is a given... but comfort matters as well”, in RAIL, number 928, page 47

Synonyms of spark up

Forms of spark up

third-person singular presentsparks up
present participlesparking up
past participlesparked up
pastsparked up

Questions about spark up

What does spark up mean?
Spark up means to rekindle.
What part of speech is spark up?
Spark up is a verb.
What is the past tense of spark up?
The past tense of spark up is sparked up.

Words near spark up in the dictionary

  1. spark spreads
  2. spark test
  3. spark tested
  4. spark testing
  5. spark tests
  6. spark up
  7. sparkable
  8. sparke
  9. sparked
  10. sparked off
  11. sparked out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spark 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.

Last updated:

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