Follow up or followup?
follow up is a verb meaning “To take further actions remaining after an event; to continue, revisit, or…”; followup is a noun meaning “Alternative form of follow-up”. follow up is written as two words and followup as one word; they are used differently.
What is the difference between follow up and followup?
| follow up | followup | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | verb, noun | noun |
| Meaning | To take further actions remaining after an event; to continue, revisit, or persist; especially, to maintain communication or verify A subsidiary action taken in response to an event A posted message on a newsgroup, etc. in reply to a previous one | Alternative form of follow-up |
| Example | Send a letter, then follow up promptly with a telephone call | none recorded |
| Forms | follows-up, following-up, followed-up | followups |
| Pronunciation | not recorded | not recorded |
| In writing | not counted (the list counts single words) | about once in every 1 million words |
Sources: follow up and followup in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of follow up and followup
follow up
- 1
To take further actions remaining after an event; to continue, revisit, or persist; especially, to maintain communication or verify
Send a letter, then follow up promptly with a telephone call
- 2
A subsidiary action taken in response to an event
- 3
A posted message on a newsgroup, etc. in reply to a previous one
- 4
A shot on goal directly following another that has been saved
- 5
The revisiting of a patient in ambulatory care
followup
- 1
Alternative form of follow-up
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, follow up or followup?
follow up is a phrase, which the list of single words does not count; followup about once in every 1 million words.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search follow up vs followup?
“follow up vs followup” is searched about 10 times a month on Bing (Google reports it together with close variants, so it has no figure of its own) in the United States.
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.