Word.ws English Dictionary

sweeten up

sweeten up verb: to make sweet to the taste.

Verb

sweeten up (third-person singular simple present sweetens up, present participle sweetening up, simple past and past participle sweetened up)

  1. (idiomatic) To make sweet to the taste.
    • I sweetened up the barbecue sauce by adding some sugar.

Forms of sweeten up

third-person singular presentsweetens up
present participlesweetening up
past participlesweetened up
pastsweetened up

Questions about sweeten up

What does sweeten up mean?
Sweeten up means to make sweet to the taste.
What part of speech is sweeten up?
Sweeten up is a verb.
What is the past tense of sweeten up?
The past tense of sweeten up is sweetened up.

Words near sweeten up in the dictionary

  1. sweeted
  2. sweetely
  3. sweeten
  4. sweeten the pill
  5. sweeten the pot
  6. sweeten up
  7. sweetened
  8. sweetened the pill
  9. sweetened the pot
  10. sweetened up
  11. sweetener

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sweeten 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-sweeten up.ogg.

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