Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A passage for drawing up smoke or air.
- n. Understanding; comprehension: very quick on the uptake.
- n. An act of taking in or absorbing, especially into a living organism.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A pipe or duct or channel leading gas, water, steam, or other liquid upward from below: used of part of a boiler furnace flue-system, in the gas-producer, blast-furnace, and elsewhere; specifically, a flue leading hot gas from the combustion-chamber or smoke-box to the chimney, in gas-making or in boiler-settings.
- To take up; take into the hand.
- To succor; help.
- n. The act of taking up; lifting.
- n. Perceptive power; apprehension; conception: as, he is quick in the uptake. Scott, Old Mortality, vii. The upcast pipe from the smoke-box of a steam-boiler, leading to the chimney.
Wiktionary
- n. understanding, comprehension
- n. absorption, especially of food or nutrient by an organism
- n. dated a chimney
- v. archaic To take up, to lift.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. obsolete To take into the hand; to take up; to help.
- n. The pipe leading upward from the smoke box of a steam boiler to the chimney, or smokestack; a flue leading upward.
- n. Scot. Understanding; apprehension.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the process of taking food into the body through the mouth (as by eating)
- n. a process of taking up or using up or consuming
Etymologies
- From Middle English uptaken, equivalent to up- + take. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“In blue states, we have out of wedlock abortions instead of out of wedlock births (well, we try to teach birth control but the uptake is never 100%).”
The Volokh Conspiracy » “Do ‘Family Values’ Weaken Families?”
“And it made little difference that atom-splitting, radar, and television were British discoveries, since like jazz and cinema the main uptake of all the big ideas was on the American side of the Atlantic.”
“He has contributed strongly to the development of selective serotonin uptake blockers, a new generation of antidepressive drugs.”
“Amazon’s S3 service took this approach and their uptake is too slow, there’s no visible momentum (I know I’ll get lots of links for saying that).”
“I don't want to be a scaremonger," Goldacre writes, "but it's relatively easy to spot drops in uptake of vaccines that happen immediately after major scare stories, or, perhaps, a major TV drama.”
“A common measure of aerobic efficiency is "VO2 max," or optimal oxygen uptake, which is determined using special equipment and a treadmill.”
“What thread holds the record for quickest uptake, that is the greatest number of posts in the course of the first hour after it appeared?”
“The design, if you are slow on the uptake is a crop circle.”
“On the other hand, the non-pharmacological options were free from adverse events and the exercise group increased oxygen uptake, which is very positive.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘uptake’.
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EMPL - Globalisation Fund
self-employed, uptake, entrepreneurship ..., re-training, reintegrate, compensate for pr..., redundant worker, adjusting agricul..., minimum threshold, collective agreement, eligible actions, reasoned analysis and 80 more...
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upt
abrupt, corrupt, disrupt, erupt, re-upped, bankrupt, rupture, voluptuous, nuptials, uptake, uptick, uptown and 15 more...
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Mollusque's miscellany
A mixture of words that I like or have commented on, along with ones parked here so they'd be listed somewhere or remind me of lists I want to make.
oranger, monographer, preoccupied, bu, bobization, coinventor, tetrapyloctomy, borgmannian, suspercollate, manhug, mancrush, obituarist and 604 more...
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ADW2
nudnik, temper, intercalate, cleave, scowl, chapfallen, malapropos, disport, annals, paean, paradisiacal, whet and 362 more...
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out of interest
lithesome, wholesome, gruesome, tiresome, worrisome, cumbersome, lonesome, loathsome, burdensome, fearsome, wearisome, irksome and 97 more...
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Reversible words
turnover, overturn, overtake, takeover, wayside, sideway, windup, upwind, takeout, outtake, upend, end up and 41 more...
Tweets
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