round up

verb

"round-up" is a 7-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.

The verdict

“round 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 collect or gather (something) together.

Corpus desk

Index EN-round-up · round up · English

round up · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables

  • FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
  • LEN-LONG 8 letters
  • VOW-3 3 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.

Key facts for round up
PropertyValue
Headwordround up
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechVerb
Letters8
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Long-tail rank of “round up” in English

round upranks outside the top 100,000 English headwords, in the long tail of specialist, archaic, or seldom-used vocabulary, exactly the territory where a reader stops mid-sentence to double-check spelling.

Beyond rank #100,000. Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list.

Rare enough to double-check

round up is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 4 senses are on record.

We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for round up, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.

This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, 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 round up, spelled R-O-U-N-D- -U-P.

Definition

  1. 1
    To collect or gather (something) together.
  2. 2
    To collect or gather (something) together.
  3. 3
    To collect or gather (something) together.
  4. 4
    To round (a number) to the smallest integer that is not less than it, or to some other greater value, especially a whole number of hundreds, thousands, etc.

Recorded use

Wiktionary examples

These source excerpts show how round up appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.

  1. The city hall needs to round up all the wrongly parked bikes across the city.
  2. They rounded up a group of experts and got their opinions.

Synonyms

Antonyms

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "round up"?
"round up" is spelled R-O-U-N-D- -U-P.
What does "round up" mean?
As a verb, "round up" means: To collect or gather (something) together.
What language does "round up" come from?
"round up" is a English word. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data for this and other words across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German on PlainSpell.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list