Word.ws English Dictionary

upend

/ʌpˈɛnd/

upend verb: to end up; to set on end.

Verb

upend (third-person singular simple present upends, present participle upending, simple past and past participle upended)

  1. (transitive) To end up; to set on end.
  2. (transitive) To tip or turn over.
    • When he upended the bottle of water over his sleeping sister, the lid popped off and surprised them both.
    • upend the box and empty the contents
  3. (figuratively, transitive) To destroy, invalidate, overthrow, or defeat.
    • The scientific evidence upended the popular myth.
    • James Meredith's forced admission was a milestone in upending the old order in America's most segregated state, a kind of race relations ground zero.1997 May 4, Adam Nossiter, “Ground Zero”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
  4. (figuratively, transitive) To affect or upset drastically.
    • By the middle of March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended normal life for virtually all Americans.
    • Coral, another company trying to upend the salon industry, obtained $4.3 million in venture funding around the same time. But Bradley Leong, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, said that because they could not get the device’s price as low as they had hoped in its current iteration, they...2021 June 1, Ellen Rosen, “Want Your Nails Done? Let a Robot Do It.”, in The New York Times

Proper noun capitalized: Upend

Upend

  1. A hamlet in Kirtling parish, East Cambridgeshire district, Cambridgeshire, England (OS grid ref TL7058).

upend meaning in Tamil, Urdu and Kannada

upend in Tamil

திருப்பு, அதிரடியாக மாற்று, திருப்பத்தை ஏற்படுத்து, தலைகீழாகத் திருப்பிப்போடு, கவிழ்த்து

upend in Urdu

الٹنا, پلٹنا, شکست دینا, حاوی ہونا, درہم برہم کرنا

upend in Kannada

ತುದಿ ಮೇಲು ಮಾಡು

Examples of upend in a sentence

  • Coral, another company trying to upend the salon industry, obtained $4.3 million in venture funding around the same time.2021 June 1, Ellen Rosen, “Want Your Nails Done? Let a Robot Do It.”, in The New York Times:
  • At the same time, the labs themselves believe that their models will soon grow so advanced that they will upend nearly all industries, wiping out huge numbers of jobs.2025 December 11, Charlie Campbell, Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo, “The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year”, in Time:

All 24 example sentences with upend

Forms of upend

third-person singular presentupends
present participleupending
past participleupended
pastupended

Past tense of upend: upended

Origin of upend

From up- + end.

Words formed from upend

Words that rhyme with upend

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about upend

What does upend mean?
Upend means to end up; to set on end.
What is upend in Tamil?
Upend in Tamil is திருப்பு, அதிரடியாக மாற்று, திருப்பத்தை ஏற்படுத்து. See Upend meaning in Tamil.
How do you use upend in a sentence?
Coral, another company trying to upend the salon industry, obtained $4.3 million in venture funding around the same time.
What part of speech is upend?
Upend can be a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce upend?
Upend is pronounced /ʌpˈɛnd/.
What is the past tense of upend?
The past tense of upend is upended.

Words near upend in the dictionary

  1. updry
  2. updrying
  3. Updyke
  4. Updykes
  5. UPEC
  6. upend
  7. upended
  8. upender
  9. upenders
  10. upending
  11. upendings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: upend (page history and authors); Upend (page history and authors); upend (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); upend (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); upend (Kannada Wiktionary) (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-us-upend.ogg.

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