Word.ws English Dictionary

upping sticks

upping sticks is the present participle and gerund 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 upping sticks

What is upping sticks the present participle and gerund of?
Upping sticks is the present participle and gerund of up sticks.

Words near upping sticks in the dictionary

  1. uppiling
  2. upping
  3. upping and disappearing
  4. upping one's game
  5. upping stick
  6. upping sticks
  7. upping stone
  8. upping stones
  9. upping the ante
  10. upping the game
  11. upping to eleven

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: upping 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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