Word.ws English Dictionary

uptake

/ˈʌpteɪk/

uptake noun: understanding; comprehension.

Noun

uptake (countable and uncountable, plural uptakes)

  1. Understanding; comprehension.
  2. Absorption, especially of food or nutrient by an organism.
  3. The act of lifting or taking up.
  4. (dated) A chimney.
    • The design provides for continuous smoke troughs of reinforced concrete, vented by circular uptakes, and the turntable area will be covered, using precast reinforced concrete bars down both sides of each track.1951 January, “Notes and News: New Roof for Cricklewood M.P.D.”, in Railway Magazine, page 67
  5. (dated) The upcast pipe from the smokebox of a steam boiler towards the chimney.

Verb

IPA/ʌpˈteɪk/

uptake (third-person singular simple present uptakes, present participle uptaking, simple past uptook, past participle uptaken)

  1. (archaic) To take up, to lift.
    • He hearkned to his reason, and the childe
      Vptaking, to the Palmer gaue to beare [...].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. To absorb, as food or a drug by an organism.
  3. To accept and begin to use, as a new practice.

uptake meaning in Tamil, Urdu and Malayalam

uptake in Tamil

உயர்தல்

uptake in Urdu

اپٹیک کریں, اپٹیک

uptake in Malayalam

പൊക്കൽ, മനസ്സിലാക്കൽ

Examples of uptake in a sentence

  • Concrete below ground must be fully tanked to prevent water uptake.
  • The culture medium was inoculated with selenium to investigate the rate of uptake.
  • Research is needed to define extrahepatic processes for uptake and distribution.

All 33 example sentences with uptake

Forms of uptake

Noun
pluraluptakes
Verb
third-person singular presentuptakes
present participleuptaking
pastuptook
past participleuptaken

Plural of uptake: uptakes

Origin of uptake

From Middle English uptaken (“to take up, lift”), partial calque of earlier Middle English upnimen (“to take up, lift”), equivalent to up- + take. Compare Swedish upptaga, uppta (“to take up”).

Words formed from uptake

Questions about uptake

What does uptake mean?
Uptake means understanding; comprehension.
What is uptake in Tamil?
Uptake in Tamil is உயர்தல். See Uptake meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is uptake?
Uptake can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce uptake?
Uptake is pronounced /ˈʌpteɪk/.
What is the plural of uptake?
The plural of uptake is uptakes.

Words near uptake in the dictionary

  1. upsy-daisy
  2. upsy-down
  3. upsy-downsy
  4. Uptain
  5. Uptains
  6. uptake
  7. uptaken
  8. uptaker
  9. uptakers
  10. uptakes
  11. uptaking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: uptake (page history and authors); uptake (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); uptake (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); uptake (Malayalam 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-uptake.ogg.

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