up sticks

idiom

British, informal
: to pack up one's belongings and move to a different place
They upped sticks and left for London.

Examples of up sticks in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web In another corner of X, however, RAC1's Marta Ramon tweeted that the real reason Gundogan had been left out was to put pressure on him to up sticks. Tom Sanderson, Forbes, 17 Aug. 2024 As the world heats up, many species are expected to up sticks and meander many miles away from their typical habitat, bringing various pathogens along with them for the ride. WIRED, 27 Oct. 2022 Pick up sticks or a guitar pick. Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press, 15 May 2022 There are certainly times when physicality is needed around the net-front, but tying up sticks instead of trading crosschecks has become an effective way to defend in the front of the net. Matthew Defranks, Dallas News, 8 Sep. 2021 As a consequence, according to Joe Carlasare, a bitcoin advocate and partner at law firm SmithAmundsen LLC, some developers in the DeFi space might simply up sticks and leave America altogether. Wired, 17 Aug. 2021 Mehring didn’t pick up sticks again until the pandemic took social gatherings off the table. René A. Guzman, San Antonio Express-News, 27 Apr. 2021 Some workers surely feared that unionizing would prompt Amazon to up sticks. Stephen Collinson, CNN, 12 Apr. 2021 Another part of its mission is to be the first step in a complicated robotic game of pick up sticks that will eventually bring some of the rocks back to Earth for scientists to study up close. Kenneth Chang, New York Times, 18 Feb. 2021

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'up sticks.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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Cite this Entry

“Up sticks.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/up%20sticks. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.

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