work up

• “Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, a critic of how the Iraq War was going, was recruited by Petraeus to be one of two outside civilians to sit on his Joint Strategic Assessment Team JSAT to help him work up the new campaign plan for the war.”

  Simon & Schuster: The Longest War

• “It was a remarkable spectacle, this flocking to a man not yet forty years old, whose chief work up to that time had been in the supposed commonplace position of a Civil Service Commissioner and of a New York Police Commissioner!”

  Theodore Roosevelt An Intimate Biography

• “Hawkins said, Yeah, he was finally ready to work up the courage to ask her for a date when we were putting Whiteflower together—then the crisis hit, and he backed off.”

  Simon & Schuster: Breakdowns

• “My recommendation to you is this: Gradually work up to exercising aerobically for approximately 6 hours 360 to 375 minutes a week at a moderately high intensity.”

  Simon & Schuster: The Life You Want

• “Tale of Two Cities, Ronald Colman," she said, looking at the screens where Bogart was saying good-bye to Ingrid, at the disk, at the screens again, trying to work up to what she had to say.”

  Futures Imperfect

• “Fracto saw them and darkened frantically, trying to work up a good rain in time to catch them.”

  Cube Route

• “He ordered up fifteen thousand sheets of paper and drafted Benjamin Dudley, the engraver retained for the mint, to work up copper plates that would stamp the paper with “National Debt” in watermark, a measure to stave off counterfeiters.”

  Simon & Schuster: Robert Morris

• “Indeed, in one place, Professor Déjérine goes so far as to permit himself to say that the hypochondriac preoccupation itself constitutes originally a purely intellectual conception, a propos of which, but secondarily to it the patient really may work up an emotion, but which is really not of emotional origin, a position first taken and long insisted upon by the reviewer.”

  The Journal of Abnormal Psychology

• “They allowed her, out of the kindness of their hearts, to work up to her eighth month, only adjuring her always to appear clean, neat, and well-groomed.”

  Simon & Schuster: The Women’s Room

• “One of these days, I am going to have to work up a spell that will let me understand other people's cats as well as my own," she said to Archaniz.”

  calling on dragons

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