Word.ws English Dictionary

up on one's ear

up on one's ear prepositional phrase: annoyed, angry.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (archaic, idiomatic) Annoyed, angry.
    • When you got up on your ear and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling, didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?1870–1871 (date written), Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], “”, in Roughing It, Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company [et al.], published 1872, →OCLC, page 552
    • [H]e has been wronged, so he gets up on his ear, and he kicks like a two-year-old bay steer.1890, Samuel R Brown, May-day dreams, Passion flowers, Poetic flights and prosy thoughts, book 3, p. 86 (Google preview)

Questions about up on one's ear

What does up on one's ear mean?
Up on one's ear means annoyed, angry.
What part of speech is up on one's ear?
Up on one's ear is a prepositional phrase.

Words near up on one's ear in the dictionary

  1. up Jenkins
  2. up line
  3. up lines
  4. up north
  5. up on
  6. up on one's ear
  7. up one's game
  8. up one's own ass
  9. up one's sleeve
  10. up one's sleeves
  11. up oneself

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: up on one's ear (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 on one's ear.ogg.

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