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Webster 1913 Edition


Upend

Up-end′

,
Verb.
T.
To end up; to set on end, as a cask.

Definition 2024


upend

upend

See also: up-end

English

Verb

upend (third-person singular simple present upends, present participle upending, simple past and past participle upended)

  1. (transitive) To end up; to set on end.
  2. To tip or turn over.
    When he upended the bottle of water over his sleeping sister, the lid popped off and surprised them both.
  3. To destroy, invalidate, overthrow, or defeat.
    The scientific evidence upended the popular myth.
    • 2014 November 17, Roger Cohen, “The horror! The horror! The trauma of ISIS [print version: International New York Times, 18 November 2014, p. 9]”, in The New York Times:
      What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked Arab world whose Sunni-Shia balance (insofar as that went) was upended by the American invasion of Iraq.

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