give up
Appearance
English
[edit]Verb
[edit]give up (third-person singular simple present gives up, present participle giving up, simple past gave up, past participle given up)
- (transitive) To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone).
- (transitive) To stop or quit (an activity, etc.)
- Synonyms: blin, cease, discontinue
- They gave up the search when it got dark.
- (transitive) To relinquish (something)
- 1816, Jane Austen, chapter 7, in Emma, volume 1:
- "Dear Miss Woodhouse, I would not give up the pleasure and honour of being intimate with you for any thing in the world."
- (transitive) To lose hope concerning (someone or something)
- They gave him up for dead.
- (transitive) To abandon (someone or something)
- 1941 October, “Notes and News: Great Western Parcels Railcar”, in Railway Magazine, page 474:
- The semi-streamlined contour of the earlier G.W.R. railcars has been given up in favour of a more utilitarian blunt-nose end, and effective floor space gained thereby.
- 1987, Stock Aitken Waterman (lyrics and music), “Never Gonna Give You Up”, in Whenever You Need Somebody, performed by Rick Astley:
- Never gonna give you up / Never gonna let you down / Never gonna run around and desert you
- 2001, Salman Rushdie, Fury: A Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN, page 7:
- The optimistic peace-and-love philosophy of his youth having given him up, he no longer knew how to reconcile himself to an increasingly phoney (he loathed, in this context, the otherwise excellent word “virtual”) reality.
- 2021 November 3, Adrian Shooter talks to Paul Clifton, “A lifetime of railway achievements”, in RAIL, number 943, page 34:
- "I tried retirement ten years ago. Didn't think much of it. Complete waste of time. So I gave it up after two weeks."
- (intransitive) To admit defeat, capitulate.
- Synonyms: capitulate, give in, surrender, wave the white flag
- Coordinate terms: give out, give way
- OK, I give up, you win.
- (transitive, baseball) Of a pitcher: to allow a hitter to make (a certain play).
- A good pitcher will give up very few home runs.
- 2019 November 14, Tyler Kepner, “After Reports of Astros’ Cheating, M.L.B. Is Left to Restore Trust”, in The New York Times[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2023-01-15:
- Fiers, who now pitches for the Oakland Athletics, has gone 27-12 with a no-hitter in two years since leaving the Astros. But the last time he faced them, on Sept. 9, he gave up nine runs, including five homers, and got just three outs.
- (transitive, finance) To execute a trade on behalf of another broker.
- (intransitive, US dialectal) To acknowledge, recognize as.
- 1969, God Struck Me Dead; Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves, Philadelphia, P.A., Boston, M.A.: Pilgrim Press, page 45:
- The next morning, Sunday, I was boxing with R., who had come over with three or four others to swap a few with me. I was given up to be the best boxer around, and I laid them cold as fast as they came at me.
- (intransitive, US, slang) To reveal (something).
- He gave up that he was the one who opened the door.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]surrender
|
stop, quit, desist
|
relinquish
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lose hope
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abandon
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admit defeat
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Adjective
[edit]give up (comparative more give up, superlative most give up)
References
[edit]- “give up”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
Anagrams
[edit]Categories:
- English lemmas
- English verbs
- English phrasal verbs
- English phrasal verbs formed with "up"
- English multiword terms
- English transitive verbs
- English terms with usage examples
- English terms with quotations
- English intransitive verbs
- en:Baseball
- en:Finance
- American English
- English dialectal terms
- English slang
- English adjectives