fuck up

Formsfucks up, fucking up, fucked up

1. 1
   phrasal verbslangvulgarintransitive

   To make a mistake or go wrong in what one is doing.

   One person can fuck up, and the whole relay team gets disqualified.

   I know I fucked up, and I'm not going to make excuses.

   Similargoof, err, flub, stumble, misstep

   Note

   Its natural setting is the blunt admission or the warning: you really fucked up this time; don't you fuck up again. It is slang and vulgar at once, so screw up and mess up are the safe swaps wherever swearing would land badly. Still, it reaches edited prose: Thomas Chatterton Williams writes "I really fucked up there" of his first book in The Atlantic in 2023.

2. 2
   phrasal verbvulgartransitive

   To do or handle something so badly that the result is a mess.

   Whoever installed this fucked up the wiring, and half the outlets are dead.

   You'll get one chance at the pitch, so don't fuck up the opening.

   Similarbotch, bungle, ruin, wreck, spoil

   Note

   Here the mistake has a target, and the object names what was spoiled: question 3 of an exam, an arcade game. A noun object can sit on either side of up (fuck up the order, fuck the order up), but a pronoun must go between: fuck it up, never fuck up it. Drop the object and it becomes the verb for making a mistake.

3. 3
   a bad mistakenoun

   Alternative spelling of fuckup.

   A fuck up in payroll meant nobody got paid on Friday.

   Her brother has always been treated as the family fuck up.

   Note

   The noun is merely vulgar when it names a blunder and an insult when it names a person. Said of someone, it brands them as forever getting things wrong or, most offensively, as damaged in the way the trauma meaning describes. Written open it can pass for the verb, and the -s tells them apart: the noun's plural is fuck ups, while the verb says he fucks up.

4. 4
   badly damagephrasal verbvulgartransitive

   To cause someone a bad injury, or to do serious damage to something.

   Three guys jumped him outside the bar and fucked him up pretty badly.

   Driving through that flood will fuck up the engine.

   Similarmar

   Note

   With a person as its object it can be a threat of violence (I'm about to fuck somebody up); with a knee or an engine it is simply serious damage. Parents blur the line. Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse (1971) lays a child's damage at the door of mother and father, and in Talking Heads' "Sax and Violins" (1991), the harm lands on the mind, the ground the emotional meaning covers.

5. 5
   harm mentallyphrasal verbvulgartransitive

   To traumatize someone or, more broadly, to have a damaging effect on their well-being.

   Losing her father so suddenly fucked her up for years.

   War can fuck up even the toughest soldiers long after they come home.

   Similartraumatize, scar, damage, wreck

   Note

   The subject can be an event as easily as a person: a sudden death, a goodbye that never happened. Speakers turn it on themselves to admit that something hurt, sometimes without knowing quite why. "That fucked me up for some reason," as Diamond Johnson's Love Me 2 (2018) puts it.

6. 6
   make drunkphrasal verbvulgartransitive

   To make someone intoxicated, or to alter their mental state in some other way.

   We got so fucked up on tequila that nobody remembers how the night ended.

   One hit of that stuff is enough to fuck up a first-timer for the whole night.

   Similarintoxicate

   Note

   Either the person or the substance can be the subject. With get, the person comes first and the drink or drug follows on: I really got fucked up on cocaine last night. Otherwise the substance does the work, as in Jess Walter's We Live in Water, where vodka is chosen "because it fucks you up fastest." The verb is vulgar, so keep it to casual talk among people who will not mind.

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