Word.ws English Dictionary

stiffen up

stiffen up verb: to become rigid, tense or stiff.

Verb

stiffen up (third-person singular simple present stiffens up, present participle stiffening up, simple past and past participle stiffened up)

  1. To become rigid, tense or stiff.

Forms of stiffen up

third-person singular presentstiffens up
present participlestiffening up
past participlestiffened up
paststiffened up

Questions about stiffen up

What does stiffen up mean?
Stiffen up means to become rigid, tense or stiff.
What part of speech is stiffen up?
Stiffen up is a verb.
What is the past tense of stiffen up?
The past tense of stiffen up is stiffened up.

Words near stiffen up in the dictionary

  1. stiff-upper-lippy
  2. stiffe
  3. stiffed
  4. stiffed up
  5. stiffen
  6. stiffen up
  7. stiffened
  8. stiffened up
  9. stiffener
  10. stiffeners
  11. stiffeneth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stiffen 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: “stiffen up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stiffen_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.