Word.ws English Dictionary

up stick

up stick is the alternative form of up sticks.

Meaning of up sticks

Verb

up sticks (third-person singular simple present ups sticks, present participle upping sticks, simple past and past participle upped sticks)

  1. (Ireland, UK, slang) To put up the mast of a ship in preparation for sailing.
  2. (Ireland, UK, colloquial, figuratively) To prepare to move; to pack up; to go and live in a different place.
    • Both of these conquered more and more of India, till at length the Rajput city of Delhi was captured, and then the disgusted Rajputs ‘upped sticks’ and fled before Islam and the Turk, and finally settled amid the inaccessible mountains and jungles and occasional fertile valleys of what is known as...1934, George Fletcher MacMunn, The Living India: Its Romance and Realities, London: George Bell & Sons, →OCLC, page 17

Forms of up stick

third-person singular presentups stick
present participleupping stick
past participleupped stick
pastupped stick

Questions about up stick

What is up stick the alternative form of?
Up stick is the alternative form of up sticks.

Words near up stick in the dictionary

  1. up someone's ass
  2. up someone's strasse
  3. up someone's street
  4. up spirits
  5. up stairs
  6. up stick
  7. up sticks
  8. up tack
  9. up the aisle
  10. up the ante
  11. up the arse

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: up stick (page history and authors); up sticks (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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Cite this entry: “up stick.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/up_stick. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.