Word.ws English Dictionary

work-up

work-up is the alternative form of workup.

Meaning of workup

Noun

workup (countable and uncountable, plural workups)

  1. (countable) A general medical examination to assess a person's health and fitness.
  2. All the additional procedures and reactions carried out after the main chemical reaction to obtain the desired product.
  3. A period of training or preparation, typically for a specific operation.
  4. (uncountable) Synonym of scrub baseball.
    • The first time I saw Amity we were in front of her house playing work-up, a baseball variation where you move from position to position by outs until you get to bat.2014, Tom Bentley, Flowering: And Other Stories
    Synonyms:
    scrub baseball
  5. An unfinished or unfinalized version; a draft, prototype.
    • He toured Japan with Judy Collins, and on his return in 1967, he presented the initial work-up on "Alice's Restaurant" at the WNYC Folk Song Festival.1990, Wayne Jancik, The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders, →ISBN, page 289
  6. A dossier.
    • They found another gun, a Glock, more ammunition. But the most troubling thing they found was a manila folder with a workup on Justice Sonia Sotomayor.2021 February 21, 60 Minutes, season 53, episode 23, spoken by Esther Salas, via CBS

Forms of work-up

pluralwork-ups

Origin of work-up

Deverbal from work up.

Questions about work-up

What is work-up the alternative form of?
Work-up is the alternative form of workup.

Words near work-up in the dictionary

  1. work-tables
  2. work-to-rule
  3. work-to-rules
  4. work-tool
  5. work-tools
  6. work-up
  7. work-ups
  8. workabilities
  9. workability
  10. workable
  11. workableness

Source and license

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