Word.ws English Dictionary

sparking up

sparking up is the present participle and gerund of spark up.

Meaning of spark up

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

Questions about sparking up

What is sparking up the present participle and gerund of?
Sparking up is the present participle and gerund of spark up.

Words near sparking up in the dictionary

  1. sparking
  2. sparking off
  3. sparking out
  4. sparking plug
  5. sparking plugs
  6. sparking up
  7. sparkingly
  8. sparkings
  9. sparkish
  10. sparkishly
  11. sparkishness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sparking up (page history and authors); 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.

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