Pickup

How to spell pickup

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pickup

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pickup mean?

1. nounA light motor vehicle with an open cargo bed at the back, often called a pickup truck.
2. nounThe act of collecting a person or item from a place.
3. nounA device on a guitar or record player that converts vibrations into an electrical signal.

Pickup in a sentence

• He loaded the timber into the back of his pickup.

• The courier scheduled a parcel pickup for nine in the morning.

• The guitarist replaced the bridge pickup to get a warmer tone.

• The farm relies on an old diesel pickup for hauling feed.

• The airport offers a designated pickup point for taxis.

• A faulty pickup left one of the strings sounding muddy.

Where does pickup come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound formed inside English from the everyday verb 'pick' and the particle 'up'. The verb 'pick' descends from Old English 'pician' and related Germanic forms meaning to pierce, peck, or pluck something out, while 'up' is the ancient Germanic directional word for a higher position. The phrasal verb 'to pick up', meaning to lift or gather something, was in use for centuries before speakers welded the two words together into a single noun in the nineteenth century. That noun first labelled the act of collecting or gathering, then spread to name a light truck whose open back is handy for picking up loads, and later the small electromagnetic device on a guitar that picks up string vibrations. Because it is a closed compound, the spelling trap is simply resisting the urge to split it into two words or insert a hyphen when it is used as a noun.

How the word is built

• pick (to gather, take up)
• up (adverb particle), fused into a single noun