mess up

verb

messed up; messing up; messes up

informal

: to make a mistake : to do something incorrectly

About halfway into the recipe, I realized that I had messed up, and I had to start over.

—often + on

She's afraid she'll mess up on the test.

I messed up on my first attempt.

Examples of mess up in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Popo would lick her cone ever so gracefully, never dripping or messing up the lining of her magenta lipstick. — Literary Hub, 16 Oct. 2026

If the sound engineer messes up, that’s somebody not putting numbers on the board, or passing the ball out of bounds. — Michael Saponara, Billboard, 15 Oct. 2026

There’s very little an actor can do to mess up a scene with Streep, although Seyfried revealed the one way a person might. — Daysia Tolentino, Entertainment Weekly, 10 Oct. 2026

But motorists also messed up on this one, crashing into or around the tree. — Doug Turnbull, AJC.com, 27 Sep. 2026

Rhymes for mess up

• backup
• blowup
• breakup
• buildup
• checkup
• cleanup
• holdup
• hookup
• lineup
• lockup
• makeup
• markup