to hook up
132
8.7
- phrasal verb
- /hʊk ʌp/
- NSFW
:
ligar
- Lo and behold, the mom got drunk and hooked up with one of his best friends.
- hook up with a guy
- get hooked up
- want to hook up
There's that one dude you've been hooking up with for years, right?
- There's that one dude you've been hooking up with for years, right?
- So when it comes to hooking up, I promise you, go slow.
- You're you're taking a very linear look at how you hooked up with Jermaine.
- Yes, You guys are just fucking hooking up, right?
- My second year out here, I hooked up with a foreign sales Rep.
- Then later she ended up hooking up with my sister-in-law.
- He's on jail phone calls talking about, you know, hooking up with other girls just the day after.
- It's just like fierce, like going out, partying, drugs, being cool, having sex, hooking up, experimentation.
- And now for some reason, last year, he decided to, like, hook up with one of my friend's sister.
Examples
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Let's hook up.
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Kids are starting to gather and hook up in the town square.
Fiction book (2000) -
So did you guys hook up the first night?
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Does the talent ever hook up after the shoot?
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You want to have some fun, we'll hook up later.
Fiction book (2002) -
I'm just going there to hook up with her.
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I mean, at the very least, we're gonna hook up with some older campers, right?
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'Next time we hook up, you'll all get to meet my son.'
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How'd you even get hooked up with him in the first place?
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Last weekend, I hooked up with an old friend from college at the party.
How Serious
Surface Forms
Morphology
The core idea of bringing together or connecting is derivable from 'hook' (to catch/fasten) plus the particle 'up', so a learner who knows the words might infer a general sense of meeting or connecting. However, the specific informal/slang sense 'to have a casual sexual or romantic encounter' is a metaphorical, register-specific extension that is not fully predictable from the constituents and can vary cross-linguistically. Because of that gap between the literal 'connect' meaning and the idiomatic sexual/romantic sense, the expression is best classified as semi-transparent.
Etymology
Hook up: The informal verb hook up comes from the image of using a hook to join two people together briefly, like connecting two things for a short time. So, to hook up someone usually means 'to meet and have a short, casual romantic or sexual encounter'.