Word.ws English Dictionary

up to speed

up to speed prepositional phrase: fully informed; current.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Fully informed; current.
    • Is Mary up to speed on the situation in Kuala Lumpur?
    • And I don't happen to recollect whether I did bring her up to speed on what Bert was asking for and so forth.1977, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs. Subcommittee on Financial Institutions Supervision, Regulation and Insurance, The Safe banking act of 1977...
  2. (idiomatic) Functioning adequately.
    • It may take the new hires a week or two to be brought up to speed on the system.
    • IBM has begun a program to better educate its sales force, Reiswig said, but admits it could take as long as six months to bring them up to speed.1992 February 3, Ed Scannell, “OS/2 slowed by sales force”, in InfoWorld, InfoWorld Media Group, page 8

Examples of up to speed in a sentence

  • It takes time after the anesthesia for the muscles to get up to speed, so your stomach and intestines may not be functioning normally yet and you won’t be able to eat.2001, Eric A. Rose, The Columbia Presbyterian Guide to Surgery, page 132:
  • For new hires joining your teams as software engineers, pair programming is a great way to bring them up to speed.2020, Heidi Helfand, Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 54:

Questions about up to speed

What does up to speed mean?
Up to speed means fully informed; current.
How do you use up to speed in a sentence?
It takes time after the anesthesia for the muscles to get up to speed, so your stomach and intestines may not be functioning normally yet and you won’t be able to eat.
What part of speech is up to speed?
Up to speed is a prepositional phrase.

Words near up to speed in the dictionary

  1. up to one's old tricks
  2. up to par
  3. up to scratch
  4. up to snuff
  5. up to something
  6. up to speed
  7. up to standard
  8. up to the chin
  9. up to the elbows
  10. up to the hammer
  11. up to the hub

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: up to speed (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-up to speed.ogg.

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