Word.ws English Dictionary

up for grabs

up for grabs prepositional phrase: available for anyone to obtain, claim, decide, or win.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic, informal) Available for anyone to obtain, claim, decide, or win.
    • Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept.1998 April 13, Salman Rushdie, “Mohandas Gandhi”, in Time
    • The Senate is up for grabs in November's election.2006 November 5, Robert Hicks, “Opinion: Separate but Equal”, in New York Times, retrieved 12 Jul 2011

Questions about up for grabs

What does up for grabs mean?
Up for grabs means available for anyone to obtain, claim, decide, or win.
What part of speech is up for grabs?
Up for grabs is a prepositional phrase.

Words near up for grabs in the dictionary

  1. up bup bup
  2. up close
  3. up close and personal
  4. Up Exe
  5. up for
  6. up for grabs
  7. up for sale
  8. up for the downstroke
  9. up from
  10. up front
  11. up gaze

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: up for grabs (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: En-au-up for grabs.ogg.

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