Word.ws English Dictionary

stand up to

stand up to verb: to object to or interfere with the actions of (someone seen as bullying, pushy, or controlling).

Verb

stand up to (third-person singular simple present stands up to, present participle standing up to, simple past and past participle stood up to)

  1. (transitive) To object to or interfere with the actions of (someone seen as bullying, pushy, or controlling).
    • If anyone stood up to him, I bet he'd back down.
    • He stated flatly that he could not run his airline with the middle seats unoccupied, as it was simply uneconomic. Actually, he probably could, but he stood up to the Government and ministers wilted and simply acquiesced. We needed some strong figure in the [rail] industry to stand up to government...2020 July 15, Christian Wolmar, “J'Accuse...! A letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson”, in Rail, pages 50–51
  2. (transitive) To withstand, to weather, to survive in spite of.
    • The paint looks good, but I don't know if it will stand up to years of weather.
    • […] it had obtained from its constituents rather antiquated and inefficient equipment, which scarcely stood up to overwork; […].1946 July and August, K. Westcott Jones, “Isle of Wight Central Railway—2”, in Railway Magazine, page 244

Forms of stand up to

third-person singular presentstands up to
present participlestanding up to
past participlestood up to
paststood up to

Questions about stand up to

What does stand up to mean?
Stand up to means to object to or interfere with the actions of (someone seen as bullying, pushy, or controlling).
What part of speech is stand up to?
Stand up to is a verb.
What is the past tense of stand up to?
The past tense of stand up to is stood up to.

Words near stand up to in the dictionary

  1. stand up for
  2. stand up guy
  3. stand up guys
  4. stand up on one's hind legs
  5. stand up paddleboarding
  6. stand up to
  7. stand up to be counted
  8. stand up to one's lick log
  9. stand up with
  10. stand upon
  11. stand upon one's dignity

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stand up to (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-stand up to.wav.

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