Meetup

How to spell meetup

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce meetup

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does meetup mean?

1. nounAn informal, usually pre-arranged gathering of people who share an interest.

Meetup in a sentence

• The local coding meetup happens every second Tuesday of the month.

• She organised a meetup for new parents at the community centre.

Where does meetup come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a modern compound built from two very old native English parts. The verb 'meet' descends from Old English 'metan', meaning 'to come together' or 'to find', which itself goes back to a Germanic root tied to the idea of a meeting place or an encounter. The particle 'up' is equally ancient and Germanic, originally signalling motion to a higher point and later picking up the sense of completion or coming together that we hear in phrases like 'gather up'. For centuries 'meet up' lived only as a two-word phrasal verb, but in the early 2000s the single-word noun 'meetup' was popularised, helped along by the social networking site Meetup.com launched in 2002. The spelling trap is purely about closing the gap: the verb stays two words ('let us meet up'), while the noun is written solid as a single unit.

How the word is built

• meet (from Old English metan: to come together)
• up (adverb/particle)