Word.ws English Dictionary

tense up

tense up verb: to become tense.

Verb

tense up (third-person singular simple present tenses up, present participle tensing up, simple past and past participle tensed up)

  1. (informal, intransitive) To become tense.

Forms of tense up

third-person singular presenttenses up
present participletensing up
past participletensed up
pasttensed up

Questions about tense up

What does tense up mean?
Tense up means to become tense.
What part of speech is tense up?
Tense up is a verb.
What is the past tense of tense up?
The past tense of tense up is tensed up.

Words near tense up in the dictionary

  1. Tensaw
  2. Tensaws
  3. tenscore
  4. tense
  5. tense harmony
  6. tense up
  7. tense vowel
  8. tense vowels
  9. tensed
  10. tensed up
  11. tensegral

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tense 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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