Word.ws English Dictionary

spun up

spun up is the simple past and past participle of spin up.

Meaning of spin up

Verb

spin up (third-person singular simple present spins up, present participle spinning up, simple past and past participle spun up)

  1. (intransitive) To reach a sufficient spinning speed for reads and writes to take place.
    • Plated hard disk surfaces are actually harder and more scratch resistant than read-write heads are. The hard magnetic medium effectively protects itself from head crashes caused by contaminants and the drive's spinning up or down.1987, PC: The Independent Guide to IBM Personal Computers, volume 6, page 222
  2. (transitive) To power up, launch, or instantiate.
    • Near-synonyms: spool up; gin up
    Synonyms:
    spool up, gin up
  3. (figuratively, intransitive) To be brought into full operation; to reach full potential or capacity; to spool up.
    • The auditorium opens and the seats fill. As ever, there's a brief, grey dead time while Wheeler waits for all the machinery of the performance to spin up. The anxious feeling is stronger than usual today. It grips him, an uncharacteristic urge to run away. Sure, he thinks. I could just junk my...2019 April 10, qntm, “CASE HATE RED”, in There Is No Antimemetics Division, →ISBN, page 136
  4. (figuratively, transitive) To fabricate.
    • For the better part of a decade, Donald J. Trump and his allies at Fox News have beguiled some Americans and enraged others as they spun up an alternative world where elections turned on fraud, one political party oppressed another, and one man stood against his detractors to carry his version of...2023 April 1, Jonathan Weisman, “Trump and Fox News, Twin Titans of Politics, Hit With Back-to-Back Rebukes”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Questions about spun up

What is spun up the simple past and past participle of?
Spun up is the simple past and past participle of spin up.

Words near spun up in the dictionary

  1. spun out
  2. spun plates
  3. spun round
  4. spun someone's wheels
  5. spun sugar
  6. spun up
  7. spunbond
  8. spunbonded
  9. spunbonding
  10. spunbonds
  11. spunge

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spun up (page history and authors); spin 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: “spun up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/spun_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.