to shake things up
26
4.2
- phrasal verb
- Informal
:
cambiar las cosas
- To increase engagement, the manager decided to shake things up by introducing new team-building activities.
- want to shake things up
- try to shake things up
- shake things up a bit
Change up your environment, shake things up, meet people that aren't like you.
- Change up your environment, shake things up, meet people that aren't like you.
- The point of this definition change is not to shake things up, but to keep things consistent and reliable forever.
- And then maybe I also put a few that are a little different to kind of shake things up.
- So introducing an anti hero into a story can be a powerful way to shake things up.
- Because gridlock means that nothing new is really going to happen, to shake things up, to transform the society that we're looking at.
- So introducing an antihero into a story can be a powerful way to shake things up.
- Like how can they start to engage some of these ideas in a way that can help them kind of shake things up?
- Then you have this moment where lots of working class people are saying we want to change in politics and we want to have a greater say and we want to shake things up.
Examples
-
Michels says there is one thing the ECB could do to shake things up, though:
Blog text (9) -
Terrible names aside, the league was losing money each season and was attempting to shake things up.
Blog text (27) -
I really wanna shake things up and do something different.
-
If you want to shake things up, you start with something small.
-
Every couple of hundred years, I like to shake things up a bit.
-
For a couple of years, universities have tried to shake things up.
Blog text (28) -
Merely changing your routine can be enough to shake things up for a bit.
Blog text (6) -
Change up your environment, shake things up, meet people that aren't like you.
-
Shawn is going to shake things up at the Capitol and help.
Blog text (22) -
Science tends to shake things up and undermine long-held assumptions.
Academic text (2017)
Synonyms
88
3.5
Change your routine to make it more interesting
55
4.3
To change how a group or system is arranged to make it work better
55
6.6
Completely change something in a new and much better way
23
3.9
To make something more interesting or exciting
3
4.1
Make someone or something more lively and interesting
2
5.1
Make something more interesting and lively, like a room or outfit
Make an event like a party more lively and exciting
Make people more interested and eager about something
Antonyms
How Dramatic
55
6.6
73
5.1
- Informal
26
4.2
∞
1.0
81
3.8
Surface Forms
Morphology
The combination of 'shake' (to disturb), 'things' (generic items/situation), and the particle 'up' (indicating change/intensification) makes the core idea of disturbing or rearranging the status quo fairly inferable to learners who know the words. However, the specific idiomatic nuance of deliberate renewal, energizing, or creating improvement/excitement is a metaphorical extension and not fully predictable without exposure, so it is not fully transparent.
Etymology
Shake things up comes from the simple image of using shake to move or mix things in a box so they change place. That's why it now means 'to make big changes to bring excitement or improvement'.