lookup

1 of 2

noun

look·​up ˈlu̇k-ˌəp 

variants or look-up

: an act, process, or instance of looking something up (as in a reference work or listing)

dictionary lookups

a price look-up

look up

2 of 2

verb

looked up; looking up; looks up

intransitive verb

1

: to cheer up

look up—things are not all bad

2

: to improve in prospects or conditions

business is looking up

transitive verb

1

: to search for in or as if in a reference work

look up an address

2

: to seek out especially for a brief visit

look me up when you're here

Synonyms of lookup

Verb

• pursue
• seek
• search (for or out)

Examples of lookup in a Sentence

Verb

be sure to look me up if you're ever in town

by the next morning, the skies had begun to clear and we were looking up

Recent Examples on the Web

Noun

Apple was the first to speed up these indirect lookups by supporting a method called an array-of-pointers access pattern in the prefetcher of their A14 and M1 chips. —Olivia Hsu, IEEE Spectrum, 28 Apr. 2026

The key technical unlock is a decoding path that turns attention lookups from linear scans into logarithmic-time queries, generating execution traces at more than 30,000 tokens per second on a CPU. —Josipa Majic Predin, Forbes.com, 21 Apr. 2026

Verb

Including a sheer numbers game that my man Blair Kerkhoff suggested was in play and prompted me to look up. —Kansas City Star, 24 May 2026

Good times for the place have come and gone under various ownerships in the years since, and things are now looking up once more. —Condé Nast, Condé Nast Traveler, 23 May 2026

Word History

First Known Use

Noun

1948, in the meaning defined above

Verb

14th century, in the meaning defined at intransitive sense 1

Kids Definition

lookup

1 of 2 noun

look·​up ˈlu̇k-ˌəp 

: the process or an instance of looking something up

especially : the process of matching by computer the words of a text with material stored in memory

look up

2 of 2 verb

: to seek for or out

look up a word in the dictionary

look up a friend