Definify.com
Definition 2024
up_sticks
up sticks
English
Alternative forms
- up stick (rare)
Verb
up sticks (third-person singular simple present ups sticks, present participle upping sticks, simple past and past participle upped sticks)
- (Britain, sailing, slang) To put up the mast of a ship in preparation for sailing.
- (Britain, figuratively, colloquial) To prepare to move; to pack up; to go and live in a different place.
- 1934, George Fletcher MacMunn, The Living India: Its Romance and Realities, London: George Bell & Sons, OCLC 562303188, page 17:
- 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 Rajputana or Rajasthan.
- 1945, James Lansdale Hodson, The Sea and the Land: Being some Account of Journeys, Meetings, and What Was Said to Me in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Holland between March 1943 and May 1945, London: Victor Gollancz, OCLC 12958259, page 24:
- If a doctor had to do an operation in a sailing ship, you upped sticks and went before the wind, he said.
- 2012, Jane Rusbridge, Rook, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN 978-1-4088-1795-7, page 154:
- Once she starts playing that infernal instrument all hours of the day and night, she can think of nothing else and sooner or later she ups sticks and is gone.
- 2013 February 2, “If in doubt, innovate”, in The Economist, archived from the original on 18 March 2016:
- There are too many examples of successful entrepreneurs who have upped sticks and gone elsewhere.
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