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mark up

B1 neutral separable transitive
In simple words

Make something cost more, or write notes on a piece of paper or document.

Literal meaning: To make a mark going upward — loosely suggesting raising something or adding marks above/on a text.

Meanings

1 B1 neutral

To increase the selling price of a product above what was paid for it.

"The shop bought the sneakers wholesale and marked them up by 60% before selling."

"Retailers routinely mark up clothing by 100 percent or more."

— Forbes, general business reporting
Grammar: separable
2 B1 neutral

To add corrections, comments, or editing instructions to a document or piece of writing.

"The editor marked up the manuscript with red pen before sending it back to the author."

Grammar: separable
3 B2 neutral

To write or add formatting code to a digital document (technical/computing sense).

"The developer marked up the page using HTML tags."

Grammar: separable
Usage notes

In retail and business contexts, 'mark up' refers to adding profit margin to a cost price. In academic and editorial contexts, it means annotating a text with corrections or instructions. 'Markup' (one word or hyphenated) is the noun form.

Commonly used with

price goods manuscript text document item

Forms

Base
mark up
I/you/we/they
3rd person
marks up
he/she/it
Past simple
marked up
yesterday
Past participle
marked up
have + pp
-ing form
marking up
continuous

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Synonyms

increase the price raise the price annotate add a markup inflate the cost edit

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