Work up or workup?
work up is a verb meaning “To raise; to excite; to stir up”; workup is a noun meaning “A general medical examination to assess a person's health and fitness”. Use work up as a verb and workup as a noun. work up is written as two words and workup as one word; they are used differently.
What is the difference between work up and workup?
| work up | workup | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | verb, noun | noun |
| Meaning | To raise; to excite; to stir up To develop | A general medical examination to assess a person's health and fitness All the additional procedures and reactions carried out after the main chemical reaction to obtain the desired product |
| Example | He worked up the public's passions to rage | none recorded |
| Forms | none | workups |
| Pronunciation | not recorded | not recorded |
| In writing | not counted (the list counts single words) | about once in every 5 million words |
Sources: work up and workup 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 work up and workup
work up
- 1
To raise; to excite; to stir up
He worked up the public's passions to rage
- 2
Alternative form of workup
- 3
To develop
work up a sweat
- 4
To give (a patient) a general medical examination to assess health and fitness
workup
- 1
A general medical examination to assess a person's health and fitness
- 2
All the additional procedures and reactions carried out after the main chemical reaction to obtain the desired product
- 3
A period of training or preparation, typically for a specific operation
- 4
Synonym of scrub baseball
- 5
An unfinished or unfinalized version; a draft, prototype
- 6
A dossier
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, work up or workup?
work up is a phrase, which the list of single words does not count; workup about once in every 5 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 work up vs workup?
“work up vs workup” 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.