ring up

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

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Verb

ring up (third-person singular simple present rings up, present participle ringing up, simple past rang up, past participle rung up)

1. (transitive, idiomatic) To telephone; to call someone on the telephone.
   • 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:

     Malone at once rang up Lord Roxton, and soon heard the familiar voice.

   • 1932, Delos W. Lovelace, King Kong, published 1965, page 4:

     "I was just going ashore to ring you up."

2. (transitive) To enter (a payment) into a cash register, or till in a shop, or record a credit- or debit-card payment.

   I'll take these. You can ring me up.

   Just ring up these items first. You can ring up those separately.

   • 1953, Jerrard Tickell, The Dart Players, page 21:

     He took out his wallet and gave her a pound note and a ten-shilling note. She rang up the sum on the till, snapped the notes into their little clip, shut the drawer.

3. (transitive) To record the payment of.

   The cashier took a long time to ring him up.

4. (transitive) To make an adverse official decision concerning (a person).
   • 2001, Christopher Devine, Thurman Munson: A Baseball Biography‎^[1], page 184:

     Munson appeared to have taken Billy's exhortation on aggressiveness to heart. Umpire Jim McKean rung him up on strikes at one point in the game, so Thurman bumped him in anger.

   • 2004, Michael Coffey, 27 Men Out: Baseball's Perfect Games‎^[2], page 31:

     Tommy Connolly, perhaps recalling Jones's earlier argumentativeness, rung him up — too close to take.

   • 2010, Gary Poole, PacMan: Behind the Scenes with Manny Pacquiao‎^[3], page 27:

     Marcos had rung him up on trumped-up charges. From his cell, Aquino led the People's Power movement and ran for president despite being incarcerated.

   • 2010, Dennis E. Ekardt, Every Life Is A Story and This Is Mine: A Memoir and Recollections‎^[4], page 251:

     During the game I gave the coach of one team, St. Ann's, a technical foul for coming on the court during the action. When I rung him up one of his players took the basketball and slammed it to the court, it bounced about 15 feet high. Bingo, another technical.

5. To rouse by the ringing of a bell.
6. (baseball) To strikeout a batter and thereby send him or her back to the dugout.

Synonyms

• (telephone): call, call up, phone, ring

Anagrams

• pig run, pig-run, puring