Word.ws English Dictionary

upped sticks

upped sticks is the simple past and past participle 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

Questions about upped sticks

What is upped sticks the simple past and past participle of?
Upped sticks is the simple past and past participle of up sticks.

Words near upped sticks in the dictionary

  1. uppe
  2. upped
  3. upped and disappeared
  4. upped one's game
  5. upped stick
  6. upped sticks
  7. upped the ante
  8. upped the game
  9. upped to eleven
  10. uppedy
  11. uppent

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: upped sticks (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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