roll up one's sleeves
"roll-up-one-s-sleeves" is a 17-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“roll up one's sleeves” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 21
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To prepare to work.
Corpus desk
Index EN-roll-up-one-s-sleeves · roll up one's sleeves · English
roll up one's sleeves · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 21 letters
- VOW-7 7 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "R" 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 | roll up one's sleeves |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 21 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “roll up one's sleeves” in English
Rare enough to double-check
roll up one's sleeves is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Zero misspellings are on record for roll up one's sleeves in our index, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. We don't track a confusable pairing for this entry, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct English form is roll up one's sleeves, spelled R-O-L-L- -U-P- -O-N-E-'-S- -S-L-E-E-V-E-S.
Definition
- 1To prepare to work.
- 2Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see roll, up, one's, sleeves.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how roll up one's sleeves appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
"We could quite easily have folded today but thankfully they rolled up their sleeves and got back into it. We could even have won it. We had a couple of great opportunities but we just ran out of juice."
TNo more pomp and ceremony, the new pope seemed to be saying, but sleeves rolled up and joining the fight for social and economic justice.
This word in other languages
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.