Upped

How to spell upped

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce upped

What does upped mean?

1. verbRaised or increased something, such as an amount, level, or pace.

Upped in a sentence

• The landlord upped the rent again this year.

• Management upped production to meet the holiday demand.

Where does upped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'to up', which grew out of the much older adverb and preposition 'up'. That little word descends from Old English 'up' or 'uppe', meaning 'upward' or 'aloft', and it has close cousins in other Germanic languages such as Dutch 'op' and German 'auf'. For centuries 'up' was only a direction word, but speakers gradually pressed it into service as a verb meaning 'to raise' or 'to increase', a use that became common from around the 1500s onward. The doubled 'p' in the spelling follows the regular English rule that a single final consonant after a short stressed vowel doubles before '-ed', the same pattern seen in 'stopped' and 'tapped'. Because the base word is so familiar, the main trap is forgetting that second 'p'.

How the word is built

• up (raise, increase)
• -ed (past tense suffix; the final consonant doubles after a short stressed vowel)