black up
"black-up" is a 7-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“black up” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 8
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To become or make (something) black or darker.
Corpus desk
Index EN-black-up · black up · English
black up · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 8 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "B" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | black up |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 8 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “black up” in English
Rare enough to double-check
black up is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
black up has no tracked misspelling variants, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is black up, spelled B-L-A-C-K- -U-P.
Definition
- 1To become or make (something) black or darker.
- 2To put on or wear blackface makeup.
- 3To make something (e.g. a film, cast, story line, etc.) more racially black in character; blackenize.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how black up appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Cantor starts blacking up, right then and there, painting his face with a burnt piece of cork.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.