upon
prepEtymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *upó Proto-Germanic *ub Proto-Germanic *upp Proto-West Germanic *upp Old English upp Proto-Indo-European *h₂en-der. Proto-Germanic *an Proto-West Germanic *ana Old English on Old English uppan Middle English upon English upon From Middle English upon, uppon, uppen, from Old English upon, uppon, uppan (“on, upon, up to, against, after, in addition to”), equivalent to up (“adverb”) + on (“preposition”). Cognate with Old Saxon uppan (“upon”), Old High German ūfan, ūffan (“upon”), Icelandic upp á, upp á (“up on, upon”), Swedish uppå (“up on, upon”) (thence Swedish på), Danish på (“up on, upon”), Norwegian på (“up on, upon”).
Definitions
A higher-register or more formal alternative to on in most, though not all, prepositional…
A higher-register or more formal alternative to on in most, though not all, prepositional uses.
- Yesterday, upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there / He wasn’t there again today / I wish, I wish he’d go away …
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for upon. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA