Word.ws English Dictionary

upstaged

upstaged is the simple past and past participle of upstage.

Meaning of upstage

Verb

upstage (third-person singular simple present upstages, present participle upstaging, simple past and past participle upstaged)

  1. (figuratively, transitive) To draw attention away from others, especially on-stage.
    • She only wore that dress to upstage everyone.
    Synonyms:
    eclipse, overshadow
  2. (transitive) To force other actors to face away from the audience by staying upstage.
  3. (broadly, transitive) To treat snobbishly.
  4. (transitive) To restage upward; to restage (a case of a disease, usually a cancer) to a higher stage than that found at last assessment.
    • Almost one-third of patients were upstaged after re-exploration, three-quarters of whom actually had stage III disease.1999, “Mismanagement of ovarian cancer by laparoscopy and laparotomy”, in Laparoscopic surgery in gynaecological oncology, Blackwell Science, →ISBN
    Antonyms:
    downstage

See all 9 meanings of upstage

Questions about upstaged

What is upstaged the simple past and past participle of?
Upstaged is the simple past and past participle of upstage.

Words near upstaged in the dictionary

  1. upstaff
  2. upstaffed
  3. upstaffing
  4. upstaffs
  5. upstage
  6. upstaged
  7. upstager
  8. upstagers
  9. upstages
  10. upstaging
  11. upstagings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: upstaged (page history and authors); upstage (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: “upstaged.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/upstaged. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.