Pronunciations (2)
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/ʌpˈɛnd/
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ʌpˈɛnd
Verb
To end up; to set on end.
Usage- Transitive
To tip or turn over.
Usage- Transitive
- Examples
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When he upended the bottle of water over his sleeping sister, the lid popped off and surprised them both.
upend the box and empty the contents
More examples (1)
Venezuela, who introduced the exciting 17-year-old Samuel Sosa late on, pressed forward and eventually carved out a golden opportunity to level. Jake Clarke-Salter, the Chelsea defender, upended Peñaranda inside the box and after consulting the threesome of video officials inside the Suwon World Cup stadium, the referee, Bjorn Kuipers, pointed to the spot.
To destroy, invalidate, overthrow, or defeat.
Usage- Figurative
- Transitive
- Examples
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The scientific evidence upended the popular myth.
James Meredith's forced admission was a milestone in upending the old order in America's most segregated state, a kind of race relations ground zero.
More examples (1)
What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked Arab world whose Sunni-Shia balance (insofar as that went) was upended by the American invasion of Iraq.
To affect or upset drastically.
Usage- Figurative
- Transitive
- Examples
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By the middle of March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended normal life for virtually all Americans.
More examples (3)
Coral, another company trying to upend the salon industry, obtained $4.3 million in venture funding around the same time. But Bradley Leong, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, said that because they could not get the device’s price as low as they had hoped in its current iteration, they were making it semirobotic to decrease the cost.
A week of public health reversals from the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has left Americans with pandemic whiplash, sowing confusion about coronavirus vaccines and mask-wearing as the Delta variant upends what people thought they knew about how to stay safe.
At the same time, the labs themselves believe that their models will soon grow so advanced that they will upend nearly all industries, wiping out huge numbers of jobs.
Verb
become turned or set on end
- Examples
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the airplanes upended
set, turn, or stand on end
- Examples
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upend the box and empty the contents